July 2005 Archives

Newspapers are running scared -- we Xers just aren’t getting our news from print anymore, we don’t need the classifieds thanks to Craigslist... we’re just not cooperating in the great game newspapers have been playing of delivering eyeballs to advertisers.

The solution?

On July 6, [New York] Times managing editor Jill Abramson and associate managing editor Rick Berke convened a lunchtime gathering of the paper’s youngest writers -- including health-system-exposé scribe Michael Luo and social-trend-piece innovator Jennifer 8. Lee -- to urge them to put their stamp on the paper.

The morning that Judith Miller was heading to jail in the name of civil disobedience, Ms. Abramson was telling The Times’ youth corps to practice a little disobedience of its own. Her message, said a staffer who attended, was: "Don’t roll over to your editors. We’re the future of the paper."

"Not to start World War III with editors," Ms. Abramson said on the phone this week, "but I wanted to consciously send them a message that we want the paper to be full of engaging writing and engaging voices."

So, at a buffet luncheon of sushi, tandoori chicken and curried cauliflower in the paper’s 11th-floor dining room, Ms. Abramson admonished the junior set to resist the paper’s "stentorian voice."

"Jill encouraged us to be rebellious in our writing," the staffer said. "She told us we should fight back. If we want to do something risqué that editors clean up, we should push back."

The designated Wild Ones consisted of 16 staffers under the age of 30. Besides Mr. Luo and Ms. Lee, the group included business writers Andrew Ross Sorkin and Eric Dash, metro reporters Sewell Chan and Nicholas Confessore, arts reporter Lola Ogunnaike and Boldface Names scribe—and occasional cartoonist—Campbell Robertson.

Ms. Abramson said the meeting with the young Timespersons was part of a larger effort to get sharper prose into the pages. "It’s a feeling in general that I have," she said. "I’m talking about writing with style and some edge, and constantly looking for the most interesting way to frame stories."

[from The New York Observer]

The upshot, so far, appears to be an uptick in the snide condescension dripping from the Times toward things geeky. In today’s paper alone, we have Sarah Boxer, who pens lots and lots of vapid stuff about the Web for the paper, breaking the news that "Cats are the Web's it-animals. They're everywhere," and then offering some in-depth analysis for this striking cultural phenomenon:

Why cats and not dogs?

Remind you of anything? Those cats are like so many bloggers sitting at home staring into their computer screens and watching other bloggers blog other bloggers. Cats, who live indoors and love to prowl, are the soul of the blogosphere. Dogs would never blog.

[from The New York Times]

Yup, that’s the way to attract the online intelligentsia: insult them.

Or then there’s Kaavya Viswanathan, whom we’re told is "a sophomore at Harvard," and her revelatory op-ed that exposes an obscure literary endeavor from Britain:

It wasn't until "Chamber of Secrets" hit best-seller lists, the summer before I began eighth grade, that my dad brought the first two books home and persuaded me to read them.

Even though I'm now in college, and buried in a reading list that's more Proust than Potter, I made sure I got my copy of the "Half-Blood Prince" on July 16 and seriously considered taking a day off from my job to read.

[from The New York Times]

Yeah, so even though Harry Potter isn’t, like, Proust or anything, even Harvard sophomores are deigning to read it!

It feels to me that, increasingly, the Times is being written by alien visitors for their readers back on Planet Xigyjkqz, who may find themselves intrigued by this Internet thing that, oh, much of the population under 40 considers an integral part of their lives. How the paper expects to woo us back when it appears determined not to understand us is a hilarious mystery to me.

But perhaps if I change my name to MaryAnn 7 Johanson and start writing the most banal crap I can come up with about "the Web" -- hey, check out that Google, will ya?! -- I, too, will be feted with tandoori chicken and hailed as the savior of a dying institution.

Turns out I'm 81 percent Loner, 69 percent Geek. Sounds about right, even almost twenty years later. High school never really ends, does it?

Find out your high school stereotype here.

Pretty birds. Messy birds. Feathers and seed hulls all over the floor. Messy, messy birds...

Oh, this is an awesome takedown of the whole corporations-glomming-onto-the-blogging thing:

Memo to mainstream media: You don't get to blog.

And that's the fundamental failing of media company blogs: they aren't blogs in the proper sense and they utterly misapprehend what is fascinating about blogging.

[from Corante]

It’s long, but worth the read. Makes me feel all cutting edge...

Gee, when I was a kid, a kid knew his or her place in the movies. The dorks and the nerds and the dweebs and the losers stayed dorks and nerds and dweebs and losers. A movie about dorks and nerds and dweebs and losers was about them coming to terms, as individuals, with their dorkiness, their nerdiness, their dweebiness, their loserness, not banding together to save the world while simultaneously proving to the popular kids that they, too -- the dorks and the nerds and the dweebs and the losers -- were cool.

If ‘The Breakfast Club’ were, god forbid, remade today, Ally Sheedy would end up running for class president, and winning. If ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ were, heaven forfend, remade today, Alan Ruck would end up saving Chicago from nuclear terrorists.

[from my review of Sky High]

See Sky High for perhaps the most dramatic example yet of how these kids today are not like we Xers were... at least on the big screen.

Cuz ya gotta have phone.

When I mentioned CraigsList to newspaper executives on America's west coast last month the colour drained from their faces.

"We're just helping people out a bit", says founder Craig Newmark, talking about the model. "We're the guys who help a neighbour by carrying their groceries."

[from The Guardian]

The whole article is great -- go read it. It’s all about how the old-school business types cannot get their head around this new way of putting together buyers and seller, or job seekers and employers, or landlords and tenants. Could the success of Craigslist be a canary in the online coal mine, a warning to entrenched and enormous institutions that seem to dominate our lives these days that their time has finally come? You can’t steer IBM -- or The New York Times -- on a dime. Are they headed for icebergs?

(Also check out "How Craigslist Has Changed New York," at New York Metro.com. It ain’t all just about apartment hunting: one of the impacts Craigslist had, according to the piece, is that "Being a Pimpless Escort Became a Snap." Um, okay.)

Generation Xers don’t come any more iconic than John Cusack. For a quarter of a century, he has embodied, onscreen, a brand of philosophical outsiderness that typifies our generation in the best possible way: If anyone could be said to be sweetly cynical, it’d be Cusack’s characters. He has been the antithesis of the whiny, miserable slacker Xer critics deride us as. He’s the shining example we can point to and say, Look, we ain’t so bad.

In 1989, he was Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything..., who consciously opted out of the post-high-school corporate rat race. In 1997, he was Martin Blank in Grosse Pointe Blank (on which Cusack is also a credited screenwriter), self-employed hitman and high-school-reunion attendee who took advantage of that marker in time to reevaluate his life. And now, he’s Jake in Must Love Dogs: an artist and an entrepreneur suffering an early midlife crisis over both his work and his love life. For lots of people around Cusack’s age, his characters hit so close to home that it almost hurts.

The video industry's biggest annual gathering opens Tuesday in Las Vegas amid some sobering news: DVD is now 8 years old and facing some growing pains.

"You're looking at libraries in excess of 100 DVDs, and at that point, (buyers) start to be more selective," Chapek says.

[from USA Today]

Whew! I thought it was just me. I recently looked at my DVD collection -- which was, ahem, much larger than "100 DVDs" -- and realized how much money I’d spent on them, how few of them I’d actually ever watched, and how close on the horizon is the time when TiVo and the Internet mate to produce an everything-on-demand entertainment environment. And I figured, damn, I’m gonna squeeze some bucks outta this while I can, and put 90 percent of the collection up on Half.com.

And people are buyin’ ’em. Suckers. And I'll always have Netflix.

My first job in publishing was at the small company that, at that time, was publishing Games Magazine (though I worked on two other utterly nongeeky publications), and I spent endlessly fun lunch hours indulging my dorkiness doing the crossword puzzles in the back issues I grabbed from the archive.

Will Shortz was the editor of Games then, though today he’s the crossword editor at The New York Times... and now, by the popular acclaim of Gawker.com readers, he’s been named the man at the Times we gals love most for his brain. (I always thought Will was cute in the face, too, not just in the head -- click through to Gawker for a pic.)

Three guesses where this is from (identifying words or phrases redacted):

"I cannot emphasize strongly enough how dangerous the present situation is, and how much care each of us at BLEEP must take to ensure that we remain safe. The BLEEP BLEEP fortifications have been strengthened over the summer, we are protected in new and more powerful ways, but we must guard scrupulously against carelessness in the part of any BLEEP or member of staff. I urge you, therefore, to abide by any security restrictions that your BLEEP might impose upon you, however irksome you might find them... I implore you, should you notice anything strange or suspicious within or outside the BLEEP, to report it to a member of staff immediately. I trust you to conduct yourselves, always, with the utmost regard for your own and others’ safety."

Could it be the head of Scotland Yard in response to the recent Tube bombings? Could it be the mayor of New York, explaining why cops are searching backpacks entering the city’s subway system? Could it be the general in charge of the Pentagon describing some new bomb-sniffing method put in place there? No?

Fill in the missing words, in this order:

Hogwarts, castle’s magical, student, teachers, castle (the speaker is Dumbledore, welcoming students back for another school year)

Is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince dark? You better believe it. J.K. Rowling, Generation Xer (she was born in 1965), has written a children’s book in which magical warfare is a metaphor for terrorism, public paranoia, and national security as a lifestyle. Is it time to admit that yes, the terrorists have already won?

And I’m only a third of a way through the book. I’m sure it only gets darker from here.

The New York Times obviously continues to read Geek Philosophy. On July 8th, I wrote:

Some generations express themselves through poetry; others, through song. Xers use T-shirts.

And in Thurday’s Times:

Lately limited edition T-shirts, most likely made in someone's cellar in Brooklyn, have suddenly become the hipster's preferred mode of expression. Whether produced by college pals with studio art degrees or sold by highly organized Web companies like threadless.com - visitors to the site offer ideas and vote on designs, which are then put into microproduction - the limited edition T-shirt has become impossible to avoid.

The trend partly reflects the great democratic welter of the e-commerce ether, and it partly serves as a marker of hipness, defined by the savvy with which a consumer can navigate the Web labyrinth in search of the coolest obscurities.

[from The New York Times]

So, the more of a Web-surfing dork you can be correlates to how hip you are. You can believe it, because The New York Times has officially declared it to be true, which must mean the trend is already peaking, or is at least already blazingly obvious to everyone except Times’ editors (see: the year it took for the Times to notice the hot new SF series that has overtones of the current national security situation).

Anyway, this is my favorite T-shirt of the moment:

Reacting to the NYPD’s announcement Thursday afternoon that police would randomly -- but routinely -- search the bags of commuters, one concerned New Yorker quickly created a way for civil libertarians to make their views black-and-white.

In a few outraged moments, local immigrant rights activist Tony Lu designed t-shirts bearing the text "i do not consent to being searched."

[from The Village Voice]

Angry NYCers -- and geek hipsters looking to make a statement -- can buy the shirts here.

Those fleece-y pet beds look so damn hot on a sticky summer day, but Cassie likes to hang out in hers anyway.

Enjoy, meatbags.

Sometimes imitation is a form of flattery:

Like some gritty 70s cinema artifact that fell through a timewarp, [Rob Zombie’s] followup rings with the unholy dread of early Tobe Hooper or even -- dare I suggest it? -- Martin Scorsese: Imagine Marty had made ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,’ and you’ve got it.

[from my review of The Devil’s Rejects]

And sometimes it isn’t:

Welcome to ‘THX 11-Michael Bay’! It’s not a science fiction movie, but an incredible simulation!

Actually, it’s more like a grand tour through a galaxy of science fiction movies: Look, there’s ‘Coma’! Hey, it’s ‘The Truman Show’! Ooo, ‘The Matrix’! Wow: ‘Logan’s Run’! Cool, look, ‘Gattaca’! If Michael Bay’s movies are theme-park rides, ‘The Island’ is, in its first half, kinda like It’s a Small, Small Brave New World: just sit back and enjoy the scenery as he chugs through a history of celluloid speculation.

[from my review of The Island]

For Melinda Wilferd, nightlife in Los Angeles was a lot like high school. The 35-year-old ran with a crowd that often went to parties in downtown lofts, "where all the faces turn around and look at you, assessing whether or not you're going to fit in the hipster club." Where if you enjoy watching TV, you're held beneath contempt. And where "they talk about music like it's some revelation."

The pretension and callowness finally got to her, and one night "I told my friends I can't do this anymore." She began exploring wine bars and jazz clubs in search of more fulfilling nightlife — and to get away from hipsters. "Now I'm more interested in what pleases me," says the employee of a major cable network. "I just want my little place in this mad, mad world."

[from the Los Angeles Times]

So even the popular kids are turning geeky now.

Except even this new geekiness is hard:

Erica Timmerman... has felt pressure since adolescence to be considered cool. That pressure, along with her cancer, is now in remission. "And I'm not going to let anyone dictate how I'm supposed to look or act, and stop trying to be something I'm not," says Timmerman.

But if it’s "cool" now not to be hip, then how can you possibly escape the pressure, the mad, crazy pressure?!

My recommendation? Get a new friend:

James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and motion pictures who responded to the apocryphal command "Beam me up, Scotty," died early Wednesday. He was 85.

[from CNN]

Oh man, I had a real thing for Scotty for a spell during my adolescence. Couldn’t stand Kirk, never got the appeal of Spock, Bones was such a crank... but Scotty. He was a like a girl geek’s dream: he was handsome, he had a fabulous accent and chocolatey brown eyes, and he was a geek, a nerd, an engineering dork. He was the real hero of Trek, kept the ship running -- hell, kept it intact when Kirk seemed damned near intent on rattling it to pieces pushing it beyond its operating parameters. But Scotty was a miracle worker -- and even though he constantly insisted that he’d need more time to work those miracles, he delivered. Always.

The classic Scottish toast, from poet Robert Burns, is appropriate here. "Here’s tae us. Who’s like us? Damn few, and they’re all dead."

If there’s a literary wing of Xer culture, its headquarters is surely McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, where pop nostalgia meets cultural criticism until they become practically the same thing... until they end up proving the point that the Xer character is intimately tied up parsing the sea of media we’re all almost drowning in.

Check out the piece "Anecdotal Leads for News Stories Reporting the End of the World". It’s a perfect example of the site’s Sahara-dry wit, and it wouldn’t be funny if the mainstream media wasn’t doing such a poor job of reporting the news -- eschewing fact-based reporting and in-depth analysis in favor of the easy and obvious human-interest story -- that bloggers have had to take over that role.

One sample from the piece:

Nine-year-old Joshua Harding didn't plan to miss classes Tuesday at West Monroe Elementary School. Nobody did.

But dismissed were his classes -- for good.

As the Net gets better and better at telling the personal stories, will so-called "real" journalists start doing their jobs again? Nah, I don’t think so, either.

So there are some girl geeks out there:

Forty-eight percent of married women say the decision to buy a DVR was theirs and 55 percent say they can work the high-tech gizmo better than their husbands, according to a national survey of 1,000 DVR users divided equally by sex.

[from The New York Post]

On the other hand:

According to a new Eastlan study, 80% of Americans still have little interest in satellite radio and the same percentage remain unlikely to subscribe to satellite radio in the future.

Five percent of those participating in the study had never heard of satellite radio.

[from Radio Ink]

Perhaps the satellite-radio marketing people should work on pairing up potential customers with one of those DVR-hip girl geeks.

What was that I was saying about the commercialization of blogging? At his blog This Modern World, political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow points out a Craiglist ad that promises to pay bloggers for blogging about their products.

What was the old joke about the woman who agreed to sleep with a man for a million dollars, then protested with "Who do you think I am?!" when he dropped his price to a dollar. "We've established what you are, madam," the gentleman replied. "We're just haggling over the price."

The blog pimps are only offering 10 bucks a day, though. Low-rent, indeed.

Item: A blogger loses her job because her employer is stunned to discover her employee might be living a more exciting life than she is.

Item: Anonymous domain registrations, by a company that charges extra in exchange for anonymity, can be unlocked with a simple letter.

Be afraid -- be afraid. Because others are afraid, too, of the new public soapbox of the Net, and they can hurt you.

Surfing the Web sometimes feels to me like walking along the beach, just at the edge of the surf, and looking down all the time to pick up cool shells and interesting rocks and -- once in a rare while -- something awesome like an intact horseshoe-crab shell that’s been washed ashore. There are lots of cool and interesting and awesome things online, but I only get this feeling when it’s bits and pieces of cultural nostalgia that sloshes into my path...

Like the thousands and thousands and thousands of old 45s someone just sold on eBay. I never had thousands, but the 45s I had as kid were way more precious to me than all the CDs I have now -- I think it has to do with choice. I could slip one of those smooth vinyl platters out of its sleeve any time I wanted, pop in the little plastic adapter, slide it onto the turntable, and hear my favorite song right now, without having to listen to the radio for hours, keeping myself up all night waiting for the damn deejay to play one particular tune. (Which I did a lot.) Now it’s just way too easy to hear any one of thousands and thousands and thousands of songs whenever I want, with music everywhere: online, over cable, from my CD collection, whatever. And so of course, I end up hardly listening to anything at all anymore: not only can enormous choice be paralyzing, but it also, paradoxically, seems to reduce the desire to partake. If I can listen to anything whenever I want, it’ll still be there tomorrow, too.

Maybe that’s just me. Maybe the Xer obsession with nostalgia (some of us are even nostalgic for our now-defunct sites devoted to the Xer obsession with nostalgia) is like everyone’s love of nostalgia: we like being reminded of a simpler time, which everyone’s childhood was in comparison to his or her adulthood.

And that might be why I am moved almost to tears -- and definitely also to laughter -- by the images at Square America, a site devoted to sharing those old-fashioned square photographs that went out in the 1970s. My family’s photo albums are full of these gorgeous little four-sided moments in time, and all the pictures of chunky little baby me are chunky little squares of history. (That’s probably why this collection at Square America, featuring images of childhoods bygone, are particularly touching.) When I take snapshots of my family and friends now, with my digital camera, I snip and crop and print out and cut down to emphasis whoever the subject is, and I still find a square photo the most appealing. Something about a square photo just says love and warmth and home to me. My little niece in the square little pix I take of her will never feel the same way, because her family photo album will feature images of all sorts of wild shapes, cut down from ink-jet printouts... unless my brother just ends up keeping only a digital album, in which case perhaps a laughing kid unwrapping a Christmas present on a screensaver will say "love" to her.

---

I found this eBay auction and Square America via my surfing today at Metafilter, which is where I make lots of interesting discoveries. I trust the geeks there to scoop up the neatest beachfinds from the seashore of the Web. I like to think of them as virtual metal-detector nerds, and we all get to share in the treasures they collect.

I went from making $30/day with Adsense to OVER $500/day, and I want to show you how!

[from What Google never told you about Making Money with AdSense]

Complete with inconsistent and random Capitalization and LOTS!!! of exclamation points, it’s the 21st-century version of the get-rich-quick:

My click-through rates EXPLODED by 300 PER CENT - in a matter of days!

I found the site through this guy, who apparently is making a killing blogging about how to blog for big bucks:

I went to the PO Box this morning to grab my mail and found my monthly cheque from Google’s Adsense had arrived for earnings in the month of May. May was my biggest earning month since I started blogging (June was a little lower due to me being away for the full four weeks).

It predominately came from two or three blogs which worries me a little (the worry is that if just one or two of them fell over it would have significant income. However on the up side the past couple of months have seen a number of my other blogs experiencing significant growth in traffic which points to plenty of potential for the future.

[from ProBlogger]

I guess I could figure out what I’m doing wrong -- I'm lucky if I make one single measly lousy buck a day via AdSense, and that's from both this blog and FlickFilosopher.com -- if I had $97 to shell out for the book full of arcane AdSense secrets from the "What Google never told you about Making Money with AdSense" guy. And if I could overcome my suspicion that the rather circular nature of the whole thing was rather... well, suspicious.

I’m sure there are a limited number of sites that are making serious money online... and I’m equally sure that there are a hundred thousand times that number whose owners plonk down hard cash because they’ve got impractical visions of $20,000 checks from Google filling their heads. These guys selling their tips and tricks and dreams of rolling in dough: I’m not saying they’re lying. I’m saying they’re like those guys who sold shovels to eager, deluded prospectors in the California gold rush... The shovels were actual shovels and they were honestly sold, but the shovel-sellers were taking advantage of their customers nevertheless.

The online frontier ain’t any different, at its core, than any other frontier we’ve faced as a culture. A few people get rich; most end up disappointed.

People who wouldn’t be caught dead browsing the science fiction section at their local Borders are nevertheless gobbling up Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, a wonderfully heartbreaking story of a romance made more difficult by the fact that one of the lovers spontaneously time travels on a regular but unpredictable basis. The time travel is a metaphor, of course, for the things that separate even the most devoted of couples, of the mysteries inherent in getting to know someone, of the impossibility of ever fully knowing another person, of the secrets we keep from each other.

But the fact that it’s easy to find yourself sobbing by the end of the novel doesn’t make the book any less science fictional. Nor does the fact that the book was a selection of The Today Show Book Club. The SF in every novel actually labeled SF and stacked on the shelves in the SF section of bookstores is metaphoric, too -- no book succeeds that does not speak in some way to who we are here and now. Some reviewers understand this:

This is an extraordinary novel with a unique premise, an exploration of the unknown in this expanding century, where the impossible becomes possible, if not routine. In the vast prism of the universe, there is much that remains to be discovered. Who can know the secrets of the future?

[from Curled Up With a Good Book]

Most don’t:

This is far from a science fiction exploration of the space-time continuum, but a heartfelt love story of two people who must live with this curse as part of their lives.

[from ReviewsOfBooks.com]

And though it's about time travel, the book is more literary romance than science fiction.

[from BookPage]

Unfortunately, this aversion to calling a spade a spade is all too fathomable. The term "science fiction" is so bogged down with images of nerds in Spock ears and unkempt, antisocial types that few people can see past the stereotypes when a counterexample is right before their eyes. It’s a shame, because those people are missing out on a ton of books they might otherwise enjoy.

Like Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward, which I read just before I picked up The Time Traveler’s Wife. The two books have some startling thematic similarities: Flashforward also involves characters who get a glimpse of their futures, as the chronically displaced Henry does in Wife; the difference in Sawyer’s book is that it’s the entire human race who gets a peek, not just one man. Sawyer is techier; his novel is more concerned with big ideas than with the hearts of only two people... but as he explores the dramatic effect the look at the future has on global society, he does so through the eyes of a handful of people. The result may be less "literary," but it’s just as thought-provoking, and just as haunting. But it’s no more science fictional just because the spine actually has the words "science fiction" on it.

Sam is quite a large cat, and hence quite a lazy one. (Or perhaps it’s the other way around: his laziness created his bulk. Either way, I cry innocence: He was fat when he came to me last year, and try as I might, he won’t slim down. Because he won’t move.) He often lies on the kitchen floor right next to the water bowl, where he can drink without the bother and hassle of actually standing up.

And yes, the linoleum really is ugly, isn't it?

He was a baby-faced undercover cop when 21 Jump Street debuted in 1987, ratting out his fellow Xers still lost in high school. He was an unconventional oddball lost in stifling surburbia in 1990’s Edward Scissorhands, where his differentness inspires fear, anxiety, and hatred. In 2003’s Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, he’s an actual pirate, lost in polite society, publicly despised but secretly admired, by some, for his resourcefulness and sense of adventure.

Expedience, ostracism, romantic piracy: all grown up too early, left to fend for himself, and resorting to whatever is necessary to survive. It’s an extreme characterization of Xers, but not an entirely inaccurate one. The signature characteristic of all these characters: a sense of being adrift, of being at the whims of forces far outside his control.

And now, I fear, Johnny Depp will extend his status as an Xer icon -- if as a thoroughly negative one -- with his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If Xers are oddballs, defying the expectations of our elders and, increasingly, our juniors, then this is one of the most dispiriting depictions of Xer outsiderness we’ve seen on film so far:

The mysterious, Big Bad Wolf danger that Gene Wilder exuded as Willy Wonka hinted at the intriguing possibilities being a weirdo offered, and exposure to that Wonka was an eye-opener, a doorway to wider horizons beyond those of dull conventionality. Johnny Depp’s Wonka, with his pale, pasty face and neurotic standoffishness, scarily invokes the Michael Jackson example of social deviance: this is our new idea of unconventionality, as debased and corrupt and possibly criminal.

That’s from my review of the film.

At least we are now forewarned, perhaps: the pop-culture image of Generation X is starting a downslide.

I popped in to see Madagascar again the other day -- which was just as delightful the second time around. And it got me thinking about castaways, and how they react to their strandedness varies, shockingly, depending on whether they’re in an Oscar-baiting drama, a CGI cartoon, a sitcom, and so on. Hence this week’s installment of Geek/Dork/Nerd.

That’s Tom Hanks, of course, in Cast Away, Dennis Quaid in one of my favorite 80s B-movie guilty pleasures Enemy Mine, and that doofus Gilligan. Little buddy? Little nerd, is more like...

I know it’s 1970s technology that was outdated before it ever flew. I know it’s holding us back from other space initiatives that would get us back to the Moon and on to Mars and Europa and Alpha Centauri and beyond. But I’ve got a big warm bundle of heart cockles reserved for the space shuttle anyway.

I watched the first launch with eager, geeky glee as a nerdy 11-year-old. I watched the disaster of Challenger with a broken heart -- I remember precisely where I was and what I was doing, exactly how our parents say they remember the Kennedy assassination. (It was a school holiday -- I was a junior in high school -- and I was about to sit down and watch a Marx Brothers movie, which is why I had the TV on, and I figured, What the hell, I’ll watch the launch first. I also remember being shocked that my regular babysitting gig for that evening was still on -- people were continuing to go about their business like nothing had happened? I couldn’t comprehend it: I was glued to the TV, because there was speculation that someone might have survived the fall from sky-high -- oh, how absurdly optimistic we get in the face of obvious tragedy -- and I was glued to the TV. How could people go to work like it was a regular day?)

I remember the very date I was offered my first real grownup job -- at a magazine in New York... because it was the same day the shuttle returned to service: September 29, 1988. Discovery blasted off successfully, and so did my soon-to-be-grand publishing career.

I remember two years ago, when Columbia disintegrated over Texas, and how terribly afraid I was -- considering the state of the world today, and how reason and logic seem increasingly to hold no sway in the world -- that the fact that an Israeli astronaut was onboard would be appropriated by someone with a political agenda to rationalize doing something horrible. I’m still stunned that that hasn’t happened.

I feel sometimes that there’s a whole big ocean universe out there and we’re farting around splashing our feet in the surf, which is of course precisely what the shuttle was designed to do -- not go too far away. But when I think about how used to the idea we’ve gotten of people being up in orbit, and when I think about how many amazing images of our planet we’ve gotten -- because what else is there to do floating around in low-earth orbit -- I wonder if maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we’re taking things slowly.

Year ago, I ran into someone I went to high school with, who was now working in a drugstore near where my parents still live. The person ahead of me at the checkout counter was paying with one of those custom credit cards that let you personalize the image on them, and this one had a space-shuttle launch on it. I made some comment about how cool that was, and the former acquaintance behind the register said, "Oh, yeah, you were always into that science-fiction stuff." And I thought: Science fiction? This is science fact. This is happening now.

But not today. Discovery’s not going anywhere for at least a few days. But she’ll launch eventually. Holy crap, she was the very shuttle who got us back dipping our toes in the water 17 years ago, in 1988, after Challenger. Gotta get your feet wet before you swim, right?

Here’s the first in a new series: Conversations with Geeks, in which I chat about all things geeky with professional geeks. First up: author John Kenneth Muir, who thinks a lot about TV and movies and shares his insights in too many books to count, including The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television, An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith, The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi, An Analytical Guide to Television's Battlestar Galactica, and many more. I met John at a science fiction convention a couple years ago, when we were both sat on panels talking about film and TV, and we hit it off instantly. Check out John’s blog, Reflections on Film/TV, for a regular fix of pop culture wisdom.

MAJ: Was there a point in your childhood when you realized there was something different, something geeky, about yourself?

JKM: I think I felt the first stirrings of my own geekiness in 1975 or 1976 when the other kids on the playground wanted to play dodge ball or kickball, but I wanted to re-enact scenes from Saturday's episode of Land of the Lost. And if memory serves, I think I wanted to play Enik (the smart Sleestak who wore a red lame gown and could control the crystal matrix tables...).

Harry Potter's latest secret may have already slipped out in Vancouver but publishers of the best-selling books hope the magical allure of author J.K. Rowling's autograph will get it back under wraps.

Rowling's sixth novel about the young wizard is not scheduled to be released until Saturday, but a Vancouver grocery store accidentally sold 14 copies of the book last week.

[from CTV.ca]

Now, when I was in high school, my geeky friends and I shared our Isaac Asmiov paperbacks around, and we got tremendously excited when Douglas Adams published something new. We analyzed The Hobbit for fun.

But we were the honor-society kids. We were the brainiacs. We were the dorks. If you had told any of us that twenty years later, little kids and grownups and people we would have dismissed as "mundanes" would be lining up to buy a fantasy novel... that law enforcement and civil courts would have to step in to maintain order while folks were waiting for this book’s release... Well, we would have laughed, and we would have considered that fantasy. And yet:

Raincoast Books, along with Bloomsbury Publishing PLC of Britain and author J.K. Rowling, were granted a so-called "John and Jane Dow'' injunction last Saturday in B.C. Supreme Court.

The injunction restrains anyone who has directly or indirectly received a copy or any other form of disclosure of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from disclosing all or any information from the book before 12:01 a.m. on Saturday July 16.

[also from CTV.ca]

We are all dorks now.

Sure, I shall be spending a good chunk of this weekend devouring Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. But I would have been doing that anyway. That so many other ostensibly normal people will be doing the same thing is extraordinary.

"ATTACK OF THE SABRETOOTH." "Bloodsuckers." "The Man With the Screaming Brain." And, most indelible of all, "Mansquito."

But, Mr. Vitale added, Sci Fi is also "trying to reach a mainstream TV audience."

[from The New York Times]

I feel like everything that’s interesting about this piece from Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section goes unspoken... and that the writer didn’t even realize the implications of everything he was conveying.

The entire tenor of the article is one of bringing some secret, arcane ritual from deepest Africa or the remote mountains of the Himalayas to the great sophisticated masses of Manhattan, as if the possibility that someone might be both a reader of the Times and a watcher of Sci-Fi’s grade-B movies is so absurd that it needn’t bear thinking. And yet at the same time, the article itself states that the audience for these movies is mainstream... and also that Sci-Fi channel is seeking a mainstream audience as if it doesn’t already have it.

The underlying assumption is a great example of the cognitive dissonance associated with all things geeky: it’s everywhere and it’s immensely popular, but it’s weird and niche and not something that "normal" people are into.

From her perch high atop the AV pile, Mrs. Kennedy surveys all her domain of the living room and also you can see a bit of the bedroom from that angle. The cable box is warm and toasty on a cool, rainy summer day. Plus, she's too dumb to know that the electromagnetic radiation is probably giving her cancer of the fur.

Following up on my post yesterday about the London bombings, The New York Times is all over this today with an article about blogs and Flickr contributing to a new paradigm in reporting:

Online photo-sharing sites and Web blogs began chronicling the attacks soon after they occurred, posting material often gathered before professional news organizations arrived on the scenes.

"A lot of what's being done by the citizen-journalist will be most useful as people start pulling together the best images and stories," he said. "There was a cliche that journalists write the first draft of history. Now I think these people are writing the first draft of history at some level, and that's an important shift."

[from The New York Times]

Of course, unspoken in all this is that it’s geeks who are changing the face of news because we’re the ones carrying around digital cameras and camera phones as a regular thing and playing with them all the time, and then we’re the ones to whom it actually occurs to share the resulting images with the whole Web. I mean, I guess everyone has that instinct to take a picture of something weird or different or interesting ("What is it?" "I dunno!" "Quick, take my picture in front of it!"), but geeks are the people with the technological inclination to use a camera all the time, not just when we’re on vacation, to document everything... and once in a while we happen to capture something really amazing. (Some artists might carry cameras all the time, but for other reasons.) You’re just never gonna see an image like this:

coming from a reporter who arrives after shit has already gone down.

[image from mobloguk]

It’s like we’re all Ernie Pyle now, in the line of fire and conveying the experience to everyone else.

(Oo, and by the way: Ernie Pyle was an Xer of his time...)

A Japanese publisher will hold a national qualifying exam for self-confessed "nerds" on their knowledge of comics, video games and other obsessive hobbies in a bid to smash prejudice and nurture a so-called "geek elite".

[from IOL]

Okay, let me make sure I understand this. Someone thought a good way to "smash prejudice" would be to confirm all the negative attributes the oppressed are perceived to evince? Someone thought a good way to improve the image of Japanese otaku -- reclusive young men who obsess on things like manga to the point of psychosis -- would be to indulge their manic obsessiveness?

Okay then.

Some folks are tired of George Lucas’s saga. I’m not one of them... but I might have to buy one of these T-shirts anyway.

Some generations express themselves through poetry; others, through song. Xers use T-shirts.

(Yeah, I’m a big ol’ Firefly dork, and I’m seriously geeked for Joss Whedon’s Serenity. But that’s a very long and very involved blog entry for another day.)

It feels a bit like 9/11 again, on the Net:

>Officials are claiming it was a power surge of some kind

Good lord. Situation in London is pretty chaotic. Lots of rumours flying around. So far, casualties appear low, although the high level of organisation (tube incident was a time to cause maximum damage) means that I'm just hoping there isn't another shoe to drop.

[from Metafilter]

Those postings were from early this morning, just as the bombings in London were happening, and this kind of contradictory, on-the-fly reporting isn’t too unlike what we saw online on 9/11.

But what’s new this time: Blogs. All of a sudden, all those personal online diaries about people and their cats and their jobs they hate and their friends they hang out with is each a little testament to survival and shock and determination to go on. Four years ago, that all happened in emails, flying back and forth, everyone worrying digitally but privately whether their loved ones were okay, everyone confirming digitally but privately that they were safe. Now, it’s happening out in the open:

I'm fine, as is Paul. Everyone we know is present and accounted for, though inevitably we know some people who were more caught up in the chaos this morning than either of us.

[from me(ish) dot org : a digital approximation]

Home at last - I've had a long day stuck on trains but I'm OK - unlike some of our fellow countrymen. Your thoughts should be with them tonight as mine are.

[from An Englishman’s Castle]

I’m still in shock about what’s happened today in London. Fortunately, everyone I’ve contacted has been OK, but it’s still been pretty devastating.

I’m going to finish this post now, as I don’t know what else to say, and I’m worried anything else I’d say would be trite.

[from Ramblin’s Rosen]

These and many more British bloggers can be found via UKBlogs Aggregator and London Bloggers.

The other big difference today: Flickr. Folks are just uploading images like crazy. Sure, this one got to Flickr via the BBC...

...but this one is jes folks, from Meg at me(ish) dot org...

I don’t think you can call what each individual blogger is doing “journalism,” but in the aggregate, I think it’s not too far amiss to call this “mass journalism,” creating a picture of a moment in time in a way that could never have been achieved even a year ago. It’s not a replacement for traditional journalistic reporting on the event -- it’s an alternative view, from down on the ground, from the people it’s happening to.

I miss Mulder and Scully and the office in the basement and the conspiracy ennui and the watching the show with the lights off on a Sunday night.

It seems that Circuit City copped on to the fact that it had been serving as an unwitting executive producer for low-budget filmmakers, with its once-generous return policy on consumer electronics. Most famously, perhaps, the makers of The Blair Witch Project shot their film on a camera purchased from Circuit City and then repacked and returned to the store after shooting wrapped.

Circuit City is no longer so beneficient, but what may be the last film made with the corp as a secret partner will be released theatrically in August. It’s a humorous documentary called My Date with Drew, and it’s all about the geeky, videocamera-flipping director’s quest to meet the actress Drew Barrymore and ask her out.

Over at FlickFilosopher.com, I’m offering all my micropatrons the opportunity to attend exclusive advance screenings in five cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Philadelphia. Sign up as a micropatron (it costs $30, and you get access to tons of exclusive giveaways, like DVD box sets, many of which are worth more than the micropatron donation), and you’ll get an invite for whichever city you want. This isn’t a contest with a few limited winners: you wanna go, you go.

For $30, you get some nice bennies and warm fuzzies for supporting independent journalism online, and I get to keep being an indie journalist. Oh, and you get a chance to support an indie filmmaker, too, by coming out for his film. It’s geeky win-win all around.