New URLs and Hosting Changeover

After many years sharing a colocated server hosted by Silicon Valley Colocation (formerly part of Meer.net), I have unfortunately had to switch over to a shared managed server hosted by Webfaction. This was not my choice, but the server was once shared by four paying contributors, and the last one decided to opt-out a month ago, leaving me responsible for a $200/month bill which, since my web sites earn no money, I couldn't really afford, despite that being a great price for great service.

I will miss SVcolo and the server itself, but so far the transition to Webfaction has been very smooth, and their prices are very reasonable for the services provided. My only complaint so-far, besides only being able to afford a shared server (my problem, not theirs), is that SFTP transfers are very flaky and unreliable, and that DNS override changes take a while to propagate even into WF's own DNS servers. I've also not yet heard back to my support request about SFTP (and one about e-mail services), but have heard back in less than 24 hours for the other four or five support requests I've made, which is a very good response rate for a shared server account at any company.

Because DNS changes are trivial using Webfaction's server control panel, I've done some things I'd been too lazy to until now, including pointing www.lhooqtius.com at this blog, and www.feralgovernment.com to The Feral Government. While I'm not thrilled about losing the freedom associated with a colocated server, the upside is that what little system administration (which I was sick of doing years ago) I have to do for my own sites is trivial, and everything else is Webfaction's responsibility. Downtime due to someone else's code run amok on the server is a real concern, but it's a risk I have to take at this point due to the economics of the situation. Hopefully things at Webfaction will be as trouble-free in the long-term as they have been over the last few days.

Slumdog Millionaire

While some people think this year has been a bad year for films, I've seen some really fantastic films this year: Let The Right One In, Death In Love, Ponyo, and now, Slumdog Millionaire -- Danny Boyle's best film, at least equal to and perhaps even better than Trainspotting (which is one of my favorite films), and a great film not just in the "Oscar worthy" sense, but also in the "people will still be watching this film in 100 years" sense.


Part love story and part social commentary, Slumdog Millionaire is a postmodern parable, a fast-paced, relentless story about struggling against seemingly insurmountable odds. Based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, it traces the tragic life of Jamal Malik as he attempts to explain to a police inspector how he came to know the answers that led him to 10 million rupees and the upcoming final question on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" This conceit is a brilliant hook, as it provides a tension line -- will Jamal be exonerated by the police, win the money, and get back the girl of his dreams -- that gives the already poignant flashbacks an added sense of urgency, and allows them to succeed in driving the main plot forward rather than seeming like pointless digressions.

The acting is excellent, especially star Dev Patel (adult Jamal) and child actors Ayush Mahesh Khedekar and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail (as youngest Jamal and his brother Salim, respectively), and Director Danny Boyle creates a sense of time and place that feels very genuine. Despite the fast pace, the editing is masterful, and there is neither staccato cutting nor excessive shakycam in an attempt to give false urgency to boring scenes. There's no need, since there are no boring scenes, and the urgency seems all too real. Sound and music is also carefully integrated, helping to craft both setting and theme, without turning any of the film into a music video (a potential Bollywood "homage" thanfully avoided by Boyle).

Some have given this film negative reviews based on what appears to me to be the flawed belief that any film which shows poor people managing to (even momentarily) be happy despite their circumstances is unrealistic. This leads to the ridiculous claim that this film which depicts squalor, murder, child mutilation, child prostitution, and a litany of other social ills is somehow soft-pedaling poverty -- presumably because it hasn't utterly destroyed the spirit of Jamal and everyone else in his class, and because no enlightened white saviors arrive to set things right and assuage their historical guilt. Since this film is a parable about the indomitability of the human spirit, there is some degree of the fantastic. But that element is restricted almost entirely to the Millionaire conceit and the endgame of Jamal and Latika's romance, rather than whitewashing the depictions of a life of poverty.

If you get a chance to see this film, do so immediately. And hopefully you will have the chance. Fox Searchlight, who showed their marketing prowess with Sideways, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, and Juno (none of which made under $40M domestic), has inexplicably restricted this film's release to 49 theaters for Thanksgiving Weekend despite the fact that it's pulling in an average of $10,000/weekend night at the theaters it's in. People do want to see this film. It's not a narrow demographic indie film (which I personally like), but a universally appealing, Dickensian story of rags-to-riches fortune, good vs. evil, and true love.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I love eating, drinking, and spending time with friends and family. Sometimes it's the one day a year I manage to relax and not get angry about how everything isn't perfect all the time (though not always -- sorry everyone who was at that first Thanksgiving in our new house in San Pablo).

Unfortunately, for my (sadly, currently AWOL) Kiowa friend Mark and other Native Americans, Thanksgiving is an anti-celebration of how a coastal tribe of First Nations people helped the subsequently genocidal English survive their first winter in a strange land. According to John Toland's book on Hitler (and other sources), the Nazi holocaust was modeled after the genocide of the Native Americans. While many things in American history may be admirable, that aspect of our collective past, along with slavery and other racist actions, is not. So this Thanksgiving I give thanks for family (like my awesome wife), friends, food, cats, art, music, literature, science, technology, a great job (even if it pisses me off sometimes) with great colleagues, and for the country that in 1955 accepted my war refugee family as residents and maybe in my lifetime will manage to live up to all its Liberal, Democratic ideals at least as much as it preaches them.

I also give thanks that our friend Todd seems on the road to recovery after his terrible accident, and that our friend Philip has survived yet another tour in Iraq (as a journalist).

Finally, I give thanks for those First Nations people and all the things they tried to teach our European forebears, including all the things they tried to teach us that "we" didn't listen to. I wish more of them were around today to share in every Thanksgiving with us, and I'd certainly give thanks if more Americans were to pause and reflect on those things in our past and how we can be better world citizens and atone for sins we didn't commit, but which we benefit from, by making the world a more peaceful and creative place (and I mean that in the least Hippie-bead-herder way possible).

Theater Weekend

This weekend turned out to be theater weekend.

Friday night we went to "The Execution of Precious Memories," a contemporary dance, vocals and music performance by Blixa Bargeld (of Einstuerzende Neubauten), Nanos Operetta, and the Kunst-Stoff dance company at Project Artaud. The hour-long performance featured interpretations, both spoken and sung, of memories submitted by the general public, accompanied by music and dance. Blixa's vocalizations, and the music by Nanos Operetta, were engaging throughout. Especially compelling were the pieces during which Blixa actually sang, making the text feel much more poetic than if it had been read. The other vocalists were not as consistent. Their performances were good, though not as dynamic as Blixa's, and therefore unable to elevate some of the uninteresting and poorly composed memories that were, for reasons unclear to me, included in the piece. Unfortunately, the least successful part of the performance was the integration of the dance with the text and music. While Nanos Operetta did a fine job of providing an exciting, interpretive score, the Kunst-Stoff dancers seemed to be dancing an entirely different piece of work. None of their movements corresponded to either an apparent interpretation of the text, nor the energy of the music. The rhythm and movement patterns of the dancers remained relatively constant throughout, despite changes in tempo and dynamics in the music, and different ideas and emotions being expressed in the text. It was worth going to hear the music, and about half the text, but the dance and remaining text were sufficiently unsuccessful that I felt they made a potentially excellent work merely pretty good.

Saturday night we went to the closing night of Thrillpeddlers' Shocktoberfest 2008 show. Featuring Grand Guignol style theater, and a vaudevillian performance of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody accompanied by a player piano, it was a silly, enjoyable evening that was capped by a very well done black-lit Spook Show, as the closer to the third and final play (which was also the best of the three). While not nearly as polished and intellectual as Project Artaud, the Hypnodrome is another local theater worth supporting, and the Shocktoberfest shows are enjoyable Halloweentime diversions, complete with beer and popcorn. Modernized interpretations of turn-of-the-century French Grand Guignol plays are performed, as are contemporary texts written in a similar style. The Vaudville meets fetish scene stylings of the troupe are, of course, very San Francisco and quite amusing. While you won't get high art from this venue, it is definitely a place to go for a good time.

On Sunday we stayed away from Theater and instead went to see Disney's Bolt in 3D. It was a lot better than I had expected, and I actually enjoyed it (though I would much rather have seen a full 90 minutes of the world presented in the opener). Furthermore, the Disney Digital 3D presented on the Dolby 3D system actually looked good, and didn't give me a splitting headache. The Dolby system is a notch filtering based technology that doesn't require a silvered screen, rather than a polarization based technology that does. It also isn't the traditional headache-inducing red-blue anaglyph technique. I'd seen an R&D demo of notch filtering based 3D at SIGGRAPH a few years ago, and it looked very promising. Now that promise has been fulfilled. And Disney's use of it was not over-the-top. The separations were all motivated, and mostly restrained, making for something I've never had before: a relatively pleasant 3D viewing experience.

Return Authorization Request

Dear Bates Uniform Footwear,

I am writing to complain about my recent order. I ordered one pair of Men's Ultralight Enforcer Tactical Sport Shoes model 2262, but I was clearly sent the wrong item. While what I was sent is able to attach to my feet, it is not exactly what I had in mind. Please see attached photo for details.

Gamemastery

Starting in January, I'll be playing my first roleplaying game campaign in fifteen years, in a world loosely based on John Brosnan's pulpy Sky Lords books. I pitched four character possibilities, and in writing them up I realized that they'd make an interesting character set for a novel or graphic novel (which I'm now kicking around as a back-burner project while I finish up a bunch of other writing projects, and work full-time). This thought led me to consider my two long-term Gamemasters, their styles, and how that influenced my perspectives on Gamemastery, and in turn, about storytelling.

Dave Osborne was my GM through junior high and part of high school (he's older than me, so he graduated, leaving only summer campaigns until I went to college). With Dave, I played several years mostly AD&D, Twilight 2000 (a great, underrated game), and a hybrid of Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. We started playing mostly by the book, or so we thought, but it quickly became clear that Dave was cooking the books to make the campaigns turn out how he wanted them to, modulo what he thought of our decisions at each turn. This realization pissed-off his brother to no end, leading to several dorky fistfights, but I saw the utter wisdom of this approach. Games of chance are boring, games of skill require actual skill, but role playing games should be neither -- they are group storytelling, and the role of the GM is to keep the story engaging, suspenseful, and enjoyable for the players. By the time we got to playing Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, we had evolved as gamers to the point that it seemed utterly natural to merge the two systems as each had weaknesses -- Cyberpunk was, for us, the better gaming system, and Shadowrun the more interesting world (though Shadowrun did have a better system for hacking, and Cyberpunk had no magic system, so we had to integrate modified versions of a bunch of Shadowrun rules into a Cyberpunk framework).

When I got to college, my Gamemaster was Sylvan Clebsch (a great GM, and also creator of Stellar Crisis, Roger Wilco, Targetware, and other interesting gaming software). Though he was creating in essence a better version of the G.U.R.P.S. idea (an RPG rules system that adapted to any game world) that ultimately became his thesis, and we playtested it for about two years (in a game world that was a hybrid sci-fi/fantasy environment where everything went), it was incredibly obvious what was going on. Sylvan was also an adherent of the shared storytelling approach to gaming, despite working on a rules system, and we'd roll dice and he'd work out the statistics of how his system was doing so he could improve upon it -- and then everything would be fudged in order to make the game go in whatever direction we had collectively convinced him was most interesting.

Occasionally we'd start a new "stick to the rules" campaign to help him shake-down the system, but those were always short lived. Characters died left and right, and the campaigns came to abrupt halts. Sylvan got some good data about his system from these campaigns, but nobody particularly enjoyed playing them. I also recall that we tried at a few other systems (definitely AD&D, and I think also Twilight 2000, GURPS, and Shadowrun) to see if these lackluster campaigns were because of a flaw in his system that was not present in other systems. No, his system was in fact superior (I still wish he had released it, but the paper gaming market was floundering in 1992). In the other systems campaigns were as short or shorter, and the shared storytelling was at least as encumbered by annoying rules accounting.

What I came to realize was that for really successful GMs, running a campaign was all about story, but not quite like in filmmaking. Role playing gaming is a shared story, evolving based on interactions between players and GM, and does not fit into a three-act structure. The idea with a good role playing campaign is more like improve theater meets serialized novelization, comic book series writing, or television series writing. What happens with the best campaigns is putting a continuing cast of characters into exciting situations that give the players (and the GM) stories that are enjoyable to weave as they work their way through the situations.

Dice rolling and lookup tables were just opportunities for the GM to make a decision about where they wanted to take things next, their modules and notes merely suggestions of possibilities. The absolute best GMs (such as Sylvan and Dave) could go "off script" for hours based on an interesting idea thrown at them by a player. On more than one occasion I caught more than one great GM "looking up" results on a blank piece of paper, merely using the rules accounting time to think about what would be a interesting thing to have happen next. (Another option is to more or less stick to the rolls, but to keep giving the player more chances, stuff like: "Sorry, you miss the jump across the chasm and are plummeting to your death -- but you land on a ledge but a couple meters down taking damage, what do you do next?")

Some people enjoy being rules lawyers and playing games of chance with their campaigns. I do not, and fortunately I grew up with two very skilled GMs who could weave a great game story, and bring their players into it (and I'm very sad that I am no longer in contact with either Dave or Sylvan). My opinion is that the most talked about, most enjoyable, and most interesting RPG campaigns have always involved Gamemasters making gross violations of the so-called rules (the ones written down in the handbooks) in favor of adhering to the one canonical rule of RPG campaigns: make them fun.

Because our GM for this upcoming game is a writer-director-story artist, I am hopeful that his approach is 99% inspiration and 1% computation. A really good story-based role playing game is even more fun than the best novel or movie you'll read, because it involves a group of friends, by creating the story together, invest themselves in it in a way unlike any "read only" entertainment (and, frankly, in a way that video games also completely lack).

Things You Can Learn From James Bond

I saw Quantum of Solace last night, and while it was action packed, it was ultimately not terribly satisfying as a film. While I must agree with Ebert's assessment that "James Bond [should not be] an action hero," the action scenes would have been more exciting had my emotional investment in the characters been greater. Being able to tell what was happening more than half the time also would have helped. It's just not true that fast cutting is a substitute for a tense, psychological duel between a hero and a cunning, materially superior enemy. However, despite not liking it as much as Casino Royale, I did come away from the film with some valuable lessons:

10) MI-6 has adopted Microsoft Surface as their computing platform of choice.

9) People just won't learn the lesson of Inigo Montoya and have some sort of plan for what to do with themselves after they've carried out their vengeance.

8) If your best operative is coerced into revealing information about your operation, you should go to extraordinary lengths to find him and kill him afterwards, because that'll clearly undo the damage done to your plans.

7) Contemporary Opera is a criminal front activity.

6) Only European super-villains know where water comes from.

5) Colonialism, corruption, crony capitalism, moral degradation, and environmental cataclysm is the fault of Green Energy companies.

4) Provided you somehow slow down within the last six inches before hitting ground, you can fall from any height.

3) Don't trust anyone above the rank of Major.

2) It's merely mildly annoying to people when one kills random bad guys, but being out for revenge against someone who has deeply wronged you really pisses folks off.

and

1) Do not hold meetings in any hotel that is made out of bombs.

High Desert Test Sites

Anu and I spent the weekend in the Mojave Desert at the High Desert Test Sites event, an arts weekend in the greater 29 Palms - Joshua Tree - Pioneertown not-exactly-metro area. It's a pretty fascinating region of the state, both in terms of the alien landscape and the odd cultural mix of military families, hermits, hippies, and reformed hipsters. Not surprisingly, the best food in the region is Mexican, and if you venture out there I recommend stopping at pretty much any mom and pop Mexican joint for all your meals.

Tromping around in the desert was enjoyable (rent a car if you go out there, because dirt roads abound, and your car will surely be the worse for wear), but the art presented by this art weekend mostly ranged from nonexistent to unsuccessful. There were, however, two actually successful installations.

The "Time Traveling Hooker," a character created by Ann Magnuson to bring life to multiple site-specific installation and video works, was far and away the best work directly connected to the HDTS event. Installed in room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn, where rocker Graham Parsons died, it is a musing about life and death, and a person's place in the world, embodied in the life and death of this particular celebrity. But I felt it wasn't really about Parsons, but rather about reflecting on what in life would bring someone to an isolated, lonely place like Joshua Tree, and how incredibly unglamorous it is to die alone in such a bleak, desperate surrounding as that room.

The Noah Purifoy Foundation, though not actually directly connected to HTDS, was also interesting. A collection of "naive" art junk sculpture, this permanent site is worth visiting if you travel to the Joshua Tree area. The work is not quite the pinnacle of found object sculpture, but a lot of it is interesting, and the architectural scale pieces are particularly compelling in how you can interact with them. Also, this installation definitely feels appropriate amongst the farm equipment, seatainers, and other homesteader detritus throughout the region.

Most of the rest of the work was forgettable, or no longer present when we arrived, except for two pieces which fit into my category of "if they were better, they could have been good." Marnie Weber and the Spirit Girls were a campy, theatrical performance art band which suffered primarily from Weber's uneven vocals and often pointless lyrics. Had she stuck with her Will-Shatter-esqe vocals, the schtick would have worked perfectly, but attempts to sing wandered into Nico territory, and beyond. The instrumentalists, however, were all quite talented and some of the compositions were imaginative and energetic.

The other near miss was Yoshua Okon's "White Russians," in which attendees were invited into the home of local residents to drink White Russians and subsequently be accosted by a melodramatic performance of stereotypical redneck behavior. It was culturally insensitive, and the deliberately uncomfortable atmosphere of the performance was overshadowed by the inherently uncomfortable social situation. Had the piece focused on a cultural meeting between the local so-called "rednecks" and the art crowd, facilitated by the artist as cultural conduit, it may have been quite interesting. I was certainly up for chatting with the locals and exchanging cultural perspectives, but the situation was not designed to facilitate this, and the staged "fight" that broke-up what social interaction did emerge was a failure as agit-prop (but certainly a success as an irritant). I didn't learn anything about challenging cultural stereotypes, prejudice, or bridging the city-country / red-blue divide. Rather, it reinforced things I already knew: pompously self-assured artists often wind up being culturally insensitive in the very way they claim to be critiquing, and people shrieking is annoying in an annoying way, not a provocative way.

While I wasn't impressed with most of the art, I did enjoy the mid-desert scavenger hunt aspect of having to drive around all sorts of unusual (to me) desert environments, spread across quite a large area, to find the installations and performances. That aspect alone made HDTS worth at least one trip, and to be fair, almost all of the art (that was still there when we got there) was sufficiently amusing to add to the experience rather than detract from it.

Happy Election Day

If you're one of my fellow Americans, make sure you get out and Vote!

R.I.P. Studs Terkel

The great Studs Terkel, author, oral historian, radio personality, social activist, and unashamed Liberal, passed away yesterday at 96.

I wish I'd had the opportunity to get to know him, but I know his work, and it has been a great inspiration to me as a writer and social activist. Terkel's books, especially Race, The Good War, Working, and Hard Times, helped shape my understanding of our nation. Though my own working class upbringing exposed me to a variety of characters in many different life situations, my family rarely left New York when I was a kid. Studs Terkel's books gave me glimpses into the worlds of people outside our region, and across generations. Even though I am also a voracious reader of more "objective" academic histories, the personal narratives in Terkel's works made history and biography even more engaging.

He led a long, full life, but his passing is still a great loss. The literary world will never be the same, as there are currently few, if any, writers following in his footsteps as oral historians and chroniclers of working class culture.