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Ratatouille, the new offering from Pixar Studios, follows the misadventures of Parisian rat Remy, who wants to be a Parisian chef. He must do so in secret, as neither his sewer-dwelling clan nor the human gastronomes would approve, but, buoyed by the memory of the beloved Chef Gusteau, he perseveres, conspiring with the young human Linguine, who can’t cook at all, but at least looks like the right species, and needs the job. Many of the jokes in the film revolve around Remy piloting Linguine about the kitchen, tugging on his hair like a puppeteer does the strings of a marionette while both try to avoid spilling the literal and figurative beans.

Actually, pretty much the whole movie revolves around this slapstick. Although other threads weave through the plot—evil Chef Skinner’s plot to steal Gusteau’s restaurant and reputation, romance with the passionate assistant chef Colette, the resurrection of Gusteau’s name in the eyes of the imperious food critic Anton Ego—Ratatouille is, at base, a buddy movie, with Remy and Linguine the point of contact between the mutually hostile rat and human cultures.

The presentation of these two cultures is decidedly unequal, with rats coming out much the better. Remy may argue with his father, but the rats commit no actual villainy to compare with Skinner’s, Remy’s dad presents good reasons to fear humans, and is the first supporting character to rethink his prejudice. Director Brad Bird usually animates the rats as small furry people, but frequently animates them as rats, especially in sight of humans. As rats, they look terrific, especially moving in a carpet, and creepy enough to remind you that humans, including you, really don’t like rats, no matter how fuzzy-cute the vermin may at times appear. The humans, by comparison, remain cartoony throughout the film, in behavior as well as appearance. The kitchen staff is a non-entity. Skinner, by contrast, is over the top. Sometimes this works, as it did for Chuck Jones’s Daffy Duck; sometimes, it’s just excessive, as it was for Walter McKimson’s. Linguine’s lack of ambition leaves him a limp noodle, and the ghost of Gusteau, we are often reminded, is not really human, but a figment of Remy’s imagination. Although Remy lives with two paws in each world, it is the rat world that makes the film interesting.

A short statement before the film properly begins places Ratatouille in a production context, describing how it was conceived, along with Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life, and Finding Nemo, in a sweeping brainstorm session taken while Toy Story neared completion. The reminder of Pixar’s successes makes it impossible to avoid comparison. Ratatouille remains close to what could be called the Pixar formula, abruptly cutting its protagonist off from his former life and forcing him to deal with a human world from a non-human perspective. This is not entirely unwelcome; Ratatouille retains Pixar’s signature talent for seemingly throwaway jokes detached from the action, as when Remy observes a lover’s tiff while dashing through their apartment’s wainscoting. She threatens him, he challenges her, a shot rings out, he boasts he knew she couldn’t bring herself to do it, loud smooches rise from below. It’s funny, but the joke also serves to establish setting: this is a city of passions, and the passions we see for food, or from Colette even for the loser Linguine, will seem reasonable. Ratatouille also adopts Pixar’s well-appreciated technique of employing voice actors for their acting, and not their celebrity status, although you will recognize many names in the credits. The characters are themselves, unlike Eddie Murphy playing himself in a donkey suit. Production values remain top-of-the-line, as we’ve come to expect from Pixar—far ahead of Dreamworks and other imitators. The audience is treated to the usual pre-movie short, although the “outtakes” shown during the credits seem to be a thing of the past.

In other ways, the distinctive Pixar fingerprint is less rewarding. John Lasseter was right to caution against developing a formula, and Ratatouille, in remaining fairly close to this emerging formula, is neither as original nor as successful as Bird’s efforts in The Incredibles, although it remains far more original and successful than Lasseter’s own Cars, which was straight, saccharine Disney. The harder Pixar works to remain creatively independent of the Disney brand, the better we can expect the future of animation to be.

Posted by at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like any kid in the ‘80s, I found video arcades attractive. Loud, crowded, smelly, yes, but full of complicated, engaging games. I never got entirely sucked in, however, because I was also cheap. I preferred my quarters in my pocket, where they belonged. Often, it was enough just to watch, if I could find someone who knew what he was doing, playing something good. Most games weren’t much fun to watch, because most games depended more on reaction speed than on strategy: mash the fire button as fast as you can, and zip around too fast for the bad guys to touch you. But a few games were slower, more cerebral, requiring you to plan ahead and work efficiently. Rampart, wherein you built defensible castles from random blocks between assaults, was one. Many of the descendants of PacMan were strategic, allowing you to draw the bad guys into various kinds of traps. The champion of games that I watched but never played, however, was Gauntlet.

Gauntlet was a shameless quarter-sucker, which is why I never started with it. It was one of the earliest games to adopt the technique of allowing you to continue play after losing instead of starting over, just as long as you kept feeding it quarters. Pay enough money, and you could make it all the way to the end, no matter how lousy you were. In fact, Gauntlet employed powerups to encourage kids to cough up a token before they even knew it would be necessary. If you paid your token after dying, you returned at base strength to a situation dangerous enough to kill you when you had damage reducers and weapon multipliers. Safer to pay the token first. Reaching this point was inevitable because life slowly drained away with time, even if nothing ever touched you. In theory, small health bonuses in game could offset the time drain if you could advance quickly enough, but I never saw anyone’s health going up. Never. A brilliant scheme to get as many quarters as possible per unit time.

That was too bad, because it had a game design to match its brilliant payment design. Taking its cue from Dungeons & Dragons, Gauntlet had players wandering a top-down view of a dungeon-like maze filled with monsters. It was one of the first games to give you a choice of figures with different abilities; you could take the slow but hard-hitting warrior, the speedy archer, the armored Valkyrie, or the wizard, and your choice would affect your ability to execute various tactics. Much of the game depended on luring your many enemies into choke points where you could kill them one at a time. But you also had to go on the offensive in order to take out the tiles that would otherwise continue to generate monsters while the clock, and thus your life, ticked away. You had to use the terrain as a shield, as well as circumvent it as a barrier. You had to plan your approach to different locations and decide when to push past extra obstacles to a different exit, allowing you to leapfrog several levels at once. Two players together didn’t just double their firepower; they could choose which hero to use for a given job, and even employ two-person tactics, like using one player to draw the monsters’ attention from behind a wall, close but safe, while the other destroyed their generator from long range. It was a thinking man’s video game, and I wanted to play it, just not at the cost of 25¢ every few minutes.

I got a taste of it recently in a demo, when Eileene borrowed Stan’s Xbox360. It was fun, despite the ancient graphics and voice simulation. (“Wizzlud nbleeds foorld, brladly.”) I remember Gauntlet getting ported to a console many years ago, and players snubbing it for allowing you to continue play by pressing the fire key in place of the arcade parlor’s token. They had a point; as I noted above, with enough quarters, you could win by brute force, and the home version effectively handed out an infinite supply of quarters. Victory is meaningless.

As exploration, however, “Press any button to continue” works just fine. It’s a lost opportunity returned. As long as I have he self-discipline not to abuse the system with kamikaze charges, it lets me go in and explore all the interesting situations I passed up so many years ago out of parsimony.

Or it would, if I were willing to pay the subscription fee to unlock the whole game.

Posted by at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Noting how much I enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s TED conference speech on Howard Moscowitz and his marketing discoveries, my parents got me a copy of Blink, in which Gladwell examines the human capacity to make good snap judgments. I finished it this morning, and it was a very good read.

Gladwell begins with a remarkable tale about the Met buying an ancient statue. It’s condition was so good as to arouse suspicions about its authenticity, so the museum employed a battery of tests to check. Authenticity validated, the Met bought the statue, and proceeded to invite art experts to study its artistic and historical merits. Contrary to the lab experts’ findings, the art experts instantly decided the statue was a fake. Further investigation proved them correct. What really catches Gladwell’s attention, however, is the way that the art experts couldn’t identify just what had led them to their independent and unanimous conclusion; it just “didn’t feel right.” Only after they’d made up their minds did they begin looking for specific tell-tales, and when they did, they selected different tell-tales. Something was going on that made unreasoned, snap decisions more reliable than exacting analysis.

Blink studies this phenomenon. Gladwell goes on to describe a series of situations in which it appears, some anecdotal, some measured in psychology experiments. Some, like one man’s ability to predict a marriage’s success or failure after watching twenty minutes of a married couple’s conversation, are surprising; others, like the disasters of a military planning room that place too much trust in calculated battle plans, are old stories whose lessons we continue to forget.

But just about the point where you’re ready to chuck reasoning entirely and shoot from the hip for the rest of your life, Gladwell turns around and describes situations in which intuition can be deeply, dangerously wrong, as was the snap decision by the police officers who shot Amadou Diallo, or the instantaneous estimate a car salesman makes of a customer’s shopping acumen. Although we can make surprisingly accurate decisions on the basis of very few variables, they have to be the right variables, and which variables are useful and which are misleading is a question that often defies our intuition, or our built-in survival instincts. This turnaround distinguishes Gladwell from the business and marketing gurus with whom he shares book store shelf space. Gladwell has the wisdom and honesty to examine the ways his thesis can go wrong, instead of selling it as a cure-all.

He concludes with several lessons to be learned from good and bad snap decisions:

1. Good snap decisions are grounded in long experience. We have to prepare to be spontaneous, learning ahead of time which variables are the right ones to pay attention to.
2. Good snap decisions depend on a favorable environment. If we are anxious, survival reflexes can override mature intuition; if we try to explain our decision afterwards, incomplete reason can override a sound decision; if we are exposed to the wrong variables as well as the right ones, we can take in the wrong cues. We should take pains to create environments conducive to good intuitive decisions.
3. Snap decisions operate best on a collection of many variables, whose values and relative weights are hard to estimate in the available time. When we have the luxury of a complete analysis, we should take advantage of it.

As someone interested in how we think, I found the book fascinating. I would have enjoyed a heavier volume, with even more examples, but that isn’t his purpose. Rather than seeking to prove intuition is better than reason, he merely wishes to raise the possibility that our intuition is far, far better than years of education may have led us to believe. Although his claim could be built on a few cherry-picked anecdotal cases in which intuition surprisingly overcomes reason, drawn from a sea of cases in which reason works just as we would expect, his attention to how the process can go wrong suggests he is playing as fair as he can. An additional perspective on the same phenomenon would be very welcome. While waiting for it to arrive, treat yourself to this one.

Posted by at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I follow the Penny Arcade comic strip. It’s not consistently funny, but it’s just funny enough just often enough to trigger my human reflex to keep returning just in case there’s a payoff. The creators, Tycho and Gabe, are a writer/illustrator team, and Tycho naturally turns out most of the bloggy commentary that accompanies the strip as well as filling the speech balloons. So I sit up when Gabe, the illustrator, leaves his element to labor over some text. His account of a Pokemon tournament was charming, if ungrammatical.

Adults do play Pokemon, so Gabe expected to see other adults at the tournament. He was disappointed: with the possible exception of one adolescent twerp, he was the only one with cause to shave. Gabe stayed in the tournament just long enough to humble the smack-talking teenager, then resigned to the teen and bowed out of the competition entirely.

This show of maturity was surprising enough. Gabe consistently depicts himself in the strip as a creature ruled by his id, violent and vulgar. The cockle-warming went even farther, however. Apparently, the television show, vapid as it is, has in fact instilled its fans with good sportsmanship; the kids played nice, spoke respectfully about one another’s pokemon, and shook hands after each bout. They chose which pokemon would do battle according to which ones they liked best, which were cutest or had the most appealing personalities in the cartoon. This was an eye-opener for Gabe, who had entered the competition with exhaustive research, and cards carefully selected for maximum winning potential. His determination to start using the pretty Beautifly card in place of the more effective Rotom card betrays a softer side we never see in the comic.

I attend game conventions myself now and then, aimed at an older audience. Most everyone there has learned to be a good sport, but we still play to win. Like Gabe, we do our best to maximize our chances; for popular games, and especially for complex popular games, this includes some extravagant study of the finer points of play. The pleasure lies as much in discovering winning strategies as anything. I doubt it would be possible to assemble a group of players who base their decisions purely on esthetics, but I’d like to see it happen, just to see what happens. Would we congratulate the player with the prettiest arrangement of pieces on the board, rather than the winner?

The closest I ever came to this experience was playing a game which called on players to battle with Play-doh creatures of their own design. Each figure’s statistics depend on how the figure is shaped: more legs means a greater movement allowance, size means a greater capacity to survive damage, and so on. The judge was careful to conceal these relationships from the players until after they’d built their clay warriors; only then did we learn what tactical qualities we would enjoy—or rather, had inflicted upon ourselves. Of course, once the free-for-all started, we were back to playing to win, but at least we’d started from esthetics. It was rather silly, and a lot of fun. Pity we couldn’t really recreate that experience, since the rules are easy to learn. A second round would have produced a lot of creatures with many, thick legs, pointed claws, and no fragile decorative embellishments—extra clay can be reserved for use as missiles, and any parts that fell off in play were lost, along with any abilities the judge decided they granted.

I’ve also seen, but never tried, a game called “10,000 blank cards,” grown out of some art students’ overstock of 3x5 index cards. The entire point is simply to illustrate and caption your own index cards and play them on one another; there are no rules, including winning conditions. I’ve tried explaining this game to friends on several occasions, and get only blank looks. Some of them can barely tolerate Fluxx, which includes cards to change the rules of play as you play, but does so in a regular, well-defined fashion, and sooner or later someone wins. Playing for the sake of playing is an alien concept for all of us.

I wonder if I could talk them into watching a Pokemon tournament with me.

Posted by at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I didn’t see the latest Democratic presidential debates, which I regret, although I have seen several clips since, and intend to watch the whole thing later. These were unusual, in that the questions came directly from the public, in the form of short videos recorded to YouTube. Well, not quite directly—but hold that thought; I’ll come back to it.

The results were pretty neat.

According to CNN, which hosted the debate, the candidates were rather nervous about the new format. I don’t blame them. Questions from the general public are less polished, less predictable than questions from, say, Tom Brokaw. The questions can get downright off-the-wall, as any politician could tell you after shaking hands in small-town diners and churches. As the surprise factor of the questions rise, so to do the chances of a career-ending goof. But the questions didn’t prove too weird, and the candidates, no doubt hardened by their experiences in small crowds, proved up to the challenge. The atmosphere was relaxed, direct, and as honest as you can expect from political speeches. The same CNN reporter who commented on the candidates’ initial trepidation went on to say they quickly warmed to the experience, and were as pleased by the atmosphere as the audience was.

So it was a good experience for everyone, combining a sense of intimate contact with a mass medium. I expect to see a proliferation of similar events.

But the little cynical voice on my other shoulder has a reservation. I said the questions weren’t quite directly from citizen to candidates. While the questions themselves were direct, CNN selected them from a large pool of submissions, essentially selecting the questions it felt most worth hearing. This filtering process is unavoidable; grossly inappropriate questions, like vulgarity from Beavis and Butthead look-alikes, incomprehensible gibberish from the people you hear on call-in radio, or rants from the American Nazis. Nor is there time to ask all the questions, even if we restrict ourselves to the meaningful ones. So someone has to select a tiny sample. That someone may as well be CNN, and my sense was that they’d done a good job. But still, as necessary as it is, as benign as it may have been, that filter was there.

As the practice of taking questions directly from the internet-enabled public expands, we’ll see other moderators, who may not be as fair-minded, or as interested in questions grounded in sober reflection, seeking instead the controversy that sells, hoping to embarrass candidates for the sake of embarrassing them, or (God help us) employed by Fox news. It wouldn’t be hard to skew the questions, and even to claim to be fair afterwards, because so many factors go into selecting the “best” ones. Do you go for topicality? Profundity? Frequency with which a question appears in the submissions? And once the hosts begin cherry-picking the questions they’d want to ask themselves, we’ll see the candidates squeezing for concessions, refusing to participate until reassured that the most dangerous questions—that is, the ones we most need to see answered—aren’t asked, just as they do for the more standard panel-oriented debates.

What we saw last night was good, healthy politics. Enjoy the innocence while you can.

Posted by at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finished the seventh and final installment of the Harry Potter series this afternoon. No, I didn’t go and reserve a copy and camp out in front of the local Barnes & Noble. Eileene did that. Left to myself, I might have picked a copy up within a few weeks, or I might have abandoned the series long ago, but if you want to have a civil conversation with a Potter fan after a new release, you need to know the difference between a Ravenclaw and a Hufflepuff, and why a hoarcrux is important. Fortunately, all I had to do was go to bed as normal on the night of the release, and by morning, the book was available for a second reader.

I’m not going to review the book here; my review isn’t yet finished. Without giving away too many secrets, however, I think I can talk about an odd sense that’s been growing in me since volume 5. I feel like Rowling didn’t so much write the last books as she transcribed them from some kind of majority opinion in the fan base.

I can’t prove it, of course. Rowling has been cagily tight-lipped, so there’s no way to know how much she planned in advance. Still, I can point to the character popularity contest. Apart from the mandatory trinity of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, the other characters appear in almost direct proportion to their popularity. Also, several big questions were resolved, less in a way that made narrative sense than in a way of which the fans would approve. Exposition is rife. The action stops dead before the climax, just so we can see a long flashback of the life of Severus Snape, the most controversial and interesting of characters. It’s hard to prove that small wrenches to the plot every few chapters were the result of stringing together the not-entirely-consistent events that fans hoped to see; consistent plotting never was Rowling’s strong suit. But it feels that way, for reasons I can’t always put my finger on.

The awareness might not have come to me at all, had I not been made aware of a growing feedback between fan phenomena and the fans themselves. A producer (or editor) taking a cue from the fanboys is nothing new; one of the original Star Trek episodes—“All Our Yesterdays”—was not written by the usual staff, but by a fangirl who wanted to see Spock in a romantic role. (Slashfic writers, take heart!) But, ever since George Lucas demonstrated the marketing power of good geek material, that interaction has increased. The hack paperbacks written for the Star Wars and Star Trek series are essentially fan works made canon. Chris Carter began writing X-Files scripts in reaction to internet buzz about the show. Managed well, as Joss Whedon did with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this form of “buy-in” builds community, and creates a series that people really, really want to see more of. Managed poorly, as in the Lost television series, it leaves the audience feeling manipulated and, ironically, disappointed in the trash they themselves asked for.

Perhaps, too, I’m especially sensitive to the feeling that the fans were writing the book because I’m using a sneaky variation on this technique in my current RPG campaign. But wherever it came from, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Potter’s grand story arc never existed in the first place, that it was generated by smoke and mirrors from reader suggestions. And, even without particularly being a fan of the series, I feel somehow cheated.

Posted by at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels started off as a crude sendup of the swords and sorcery genre. By Pratchett’s own admission, he’s gotten a lot better since then. While he retains the satire, his characters are now characters in their own right, rather than merely rubbished versions of someone else’s protagonist. The plots got a lot better, too, once he started taking shots at the people who make human institutions work the way they do, instead of blaming it all on the plots of unspeakable things from beyond dimension.

He still sticks largely to a system of satirizing major institutions, one per book. He’s done rock and roll, the army, the police, the diplomatic corps, the press, the postal service, international phone companies, cinema, organized religion, and others, depending on where you draw the line between a brief mention and a proper satire. He takes particular delight in savaging power structures of all kinds, and the people who lead them for personal (and deeply hypocritical) gain.

The one leader who comes out all right in all this criticism is Lord Vetinari, who sits atop the squalid city of Ankh-Morpork and somehow manages to keep it all running, despite—or rather, by using—its citizens’ casual greed, treachery, and stupidity. Vetinari is in some sense the antithesis of the egocentric leaders Pratchett so despises; although Vetinari openly claims to be a self-interested tyrant, he has so embraced the concept of enlightened self-interest that every time he winds up on top, so too does his city and a few deserving souls trying to do the right thing.

One such success story is the former captain and now ducal commander of the watch, Samuel Vimes. They are my favorite characters from the series, hands down, and both are at their best when squared off against one another. Pratchett must particularly love them, too. He dares not use the omnicompetent Vetinari as a protagonist, but Vimes has been the protagonist four or five times, more than anyone else since the original Rincewind, failed sorcerer, and Vetinari often sets the ball in motion though he is hardly present through the book. I can’t decide which I like better, nor with which one I identify more strongly.

Every time I get to the question of character identification, I sigh inwardly, because I am nothing like either Vetinari or Vimes. Of the recurring characters, I most resemble Ponder Stibbons, the wizard tied up in the sorcerous Unseen University’s equivalent of a computer science department. (To be honest, I most resemble the Senior Wrangler, also at Unseen University, a hair-splitting academic of no value whatsoever. But he isn’t a recurring character, so he doesn’t count.) To date, Stibbons hasn’t appeared much, or accomplished much, which is why I sigh.

But I have hope that my alter-ego will prove himself some day. He has slowly transformed from insignificant student, noteworthy only for sharing a room with another character, to the youngest, keenest, and therefore most generally frustrated and ignored of the UU’s staff. He is particularly ignored by the UU’s bull-headed Archdean, but he keeps trying to get the Archdean to understand the point at hand. A hapless fellow with just enough self-respect to try to try to stick to what he understands to be true in the face of an uncaring or stupidly hostile community is Pratchett’s archetype protagonist. Stibbons also stands squarely in unexplored territory. We’ve seen the magical computer science department, but we’ve never seen it used for much. Computing power is just the kind of thing the power-hungry can abuse, as long as they keep people ignorant, which is Pratchett’s favorite sort of villain. And, while computers are certainly powerful, someone who knows them is just as keenly aware of the limits of that power; Stibbons could be caught one the horns of the “garbage in, garbage out” dilemma—calculations are no more accurate or reliable than the input data—while desperately needing to use his calculating power to stave off disaster.

Stibbons has all the marks of a Discworld hero; he just hasn’t made the big time yet. I think Pratchett just needs someone to describe the slings and arrows suffered by applied mathematicians at the hands of fortune or idiot clients to make Stibbons—and by extension, me—a Discworld hero.

Posted by at 8:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I saw a web page devoted to word association. It offers you a word and asks you to respond with another. Once you do, it gives you another word, and the process continues as long as you like. Whenever you get tired of it, you can move on over to the list of the most recent words you’ve seen, along with your responses and a count of how many people responded the same way. Clicking on any of these words (queries or responses) moves you to an interactive network of bubbles connected by dark lines, a visual representation of the tiny fragment of the network surrounding that particular word. The bigger the bubble, the more common the word; the thicker the connecting line, the more responses received associating two words. You can click any of the associates to see what it connects to in turn, and so on, although the bubbles fade out over time, to keep the screen legible.

The network is necessarily connected because it started with the single word “volcano” and built itself up recursively. Every word (other than “volcano”) to which you are asked to reply is somebody else’s response to a word already in the network.

I’m pretty sure this has been done before, probably several times. It’s easy to implement, and builds itself up in no time. This particular example could use some more depth of graphic representation; after three steps, your starting word has faded away, which doesn’t leave much room for intricacy, or for surprising loops. Some of the associations are surprising, but mostly in the context of how few steps it takes to get from one word to a wholly unrelated word. “Donut” to “Submarine” in two steps isn’t very interesting—donut to sandwich to submarine is an obvious route—but doing it in three steps through “Homer Simpson” and “yellow” is. The five-step round trip among words that have nothing to do with words two steps away is cool, but since only a very short tree is shown at once, you have to rely on your memory to discover them.

Unfortunately, interesting links are few and far between. This is partly because most links are prosaic: asked to respond to “cow,” you might respond “bull,” or “pasture,” but probably not “purple,” even though “purple” and “cow” do have a direct connection, thanks to the poem, and ice cream fountains. It is also partly because the engine is not sufficiently selective. Whole phrases don’t belong here, nor do misspellings. But the sparseness of interesting links is due primarily to the paucity of the participants’ imaginations.

As I learned by going to the top page, the number one entry is “sex.” This does not surprise me, as, two steps from my first entry to the graphic on the word “whey,” I hit “fuck.” “Fuck” has a lot of connections. A lot a lot. And that’s not counting variations like “fuk,” “fux,” and “fuxxor.” Random key bashings were common, too: “asdf,” “giojsl,” and “feije.” At times, it seems like the bulk of the free association word web is the product of a Tourette’s Syndrome support group. The query-response engine includes a button to eliminate non-words and bad spelling, but enterprising editors can’t keep up with the potty-mouths who think typing “fuck” into the box is hilarious. When it comes to studying human intelligence, even informally, somebody’s always willing to spoil the party. And that’s a shame.

I’d very much like to see a more representative description of the words people thought of. In one sense, of course, lots of people were thinking the words “sex” and “fuck,” but that’s not what I mean; I mean I’d like to see what thinking people were thinking. This isn’t it.

Posted by at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We all know that somebody’s going to have to pay for the record-breaking deficit under which we labor. Right now, foreign investors are footing our bills, but it’s only a loan. The growth promised by supply-side economics has failed to materialize, and our tax base isn’t getting any larger. It’s getting smaller, in fact, because, under neo-conservative rule, taxes have dropped preferentially for the wealthy, while the middle and lower classes earn less to tax.

Dispense with the notion of “making tax cuts [of the past seven years] permanent." The budget is set yearly. No tax settings, high or low or mixed, are permanent. Nor can they be, even in theory, as part of a deficit budget. Tax cuts whose impact on the budget is hidden by borrowing have to be paid for when the loan is due. For every dollar the country spends, the government must collect a dollar sooner or later, and the government collects its dollars by taxing. You can pay now, or you can pay later, but you will pay for all national spending. And the later you pay, the more you’ll pay in the end, thanks to interest charges. The only “permanent” tax cuts you’ll ever see are those coupled to spending cuts, which are in short supply these days, despite the primacy of a party claiming to be built on fiscal responsibility. Speaking of “permanent” tax cuts on a deficit is gibberish. Doo-doo economics, to coin a phrase.

So we’ve racked up enormous bills getting a lot of military equipment—to say nothing of the soldiers—smashed up in a foreign adventure. We’ve magnified those bills, and the cost of already existing expenditures, by putting them on the nation’s credit card, returning a grossly disproportional amount of those very temporary savings to the wealthiest 1% of our population.

Which, it seems to me, makes it clear who should foot the bill when it comes due. Over half the gross dollar amount of the tax cuts went to the wealthiest 1% of earners. Nor was this the simple result of the wealthy earning more, and so receiving a greater portion of the cut. The tax reduction was disproportional; the wealthiest 1% of earners are enjoying a 39.9% reduction in their income taxes, while the middle fifth of earners received only a 12.9% cut. The justification for this imbalance was that the wealthy would be investing the money, making us all wealthier, while the poor would just go and spend the money on stuff like groceries and mortgages. Let’s take that claim at face value. With all this loose cash sloshing around, the wealthiest 1% should easily be able to cover the tax revenues we lost from them since Bush’s arrival. They should easily be able to cover the interest, too, since investment money grows faster than bank interest. And they’ll still have a slim but decidedly positive balance on the whole deal.

If, on the other hand, they can’t cover the tax money they’ve been allowed to withhold for seven years, that’s a different kettle of fish. If the rich have been spending their tax windfall on jewelry and yachts instead of sober investment, or if (gasp!) giving money to the wealthy does not enrich the nation, then they’ve been plundering the national treasury for personal use, and they definitely ought to be held accountable for the tax revenues we’ve lost.

Reinstating the inheritance tax would be a good start. We as a nation hold to independence and productivity as virtues; inheritance money should be even more subject to taxes than money earned by honest labor. Once an heir is an adult, he is no longer a dependent of his parents, at least in principle. An inheritance, passed from one sovereign legal entity to another, is income. Tax it, just like the country taxes everyone else. Reinstating some of the corporate taxation levels we’ve lost, on the same rationale, would be a good place to follow through.

I’m not saying they stole the money; I’m just saying I’d like for the treasury to get it back.

Posted by at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We watched the latest film installment of Harry Potter yesterday. It was adequate. While chunks of the movie don’t match my memory of the book, I confess that’s probably because my memory of the books isn’t very good. I continue to read them more out of a duty to remain culturally literate than for their merits as literature, or out of any real enthusiasm for the content. Apart from the mysteries of Snape’s motivations, about which I am genuinely curious, the characters are two-dimensional, the plotting ham-fisted, and the setting artificial. I never find myself thinking, “If there were a hidden sub-culture of wizards with a system of private schools to teach magic to the young, this is what it would be like.”

But that’s okay, because Harry Potter is a series of children’s books, written for an audience largely unready for capital-L Literature. Characters need to be a little obvious; plot devices can be predictable for an audience that hasn’t seen them over and over. So long as it gets kids reading, I’m for it. But the grown-ups, now… they need to get a grip. We tend to forget that Harry Potter is for kids because so many adults have seized upon Potter as their own obsession. Living as I do in social circles dense with fanboys (or, more accurately in this case, fangirls), I can’t help but pick up a certain amount of background chatter speculating about the conclusion, or about what’s really going on “off-camera.” Speculation is running high. Fans are watching the movie, of course, but everyone already knows what happens, apart from an editorial trimming or two. The real attention is on the next book. You can see some predictions at the naturofan forums and hogwarts.com, if you’re interested.

Set aside the obvious wish-fulfillment fantasies (Dumbledore isn’t dead, Harry will get it on with Hermione, etc.) as unrealistic and motivated more by desire than expectation. What remains tends heavily to painstaking detail that would do a conspiracy theorist proud, taking snippets from three different books from their proper context and threading them together as though Rowling had planned details like this all along.

This approach gives Rowling far too much credit. Like the script-writers for the original Star Trek (also subjected to painstaking fanboy analysis), she’s been too busy trying to get the stories down on paper to be engaged in that kind of error checking. And, while I can’t prove it, the series reads like Rowling has been making up quite a bit as she goes along, taking her cue from the fans. When equally detailed analysis can uncover minor contradictions (and it does), or if fan predictions affect future works, relying on the tiniest details for clues revealing the mind of Rowling is pointless.

We are not dealing with James Joyce, who agonized over individual words to the point where a friend considered seven words a day progress, nor are we dealing with T. S. Eliot, whose works depended on literary reference and self-reference to the point where even he didn’t always know what he was talking about. We are dealing with an author of children’s books, cranking out hundreds of pages per installment to a press hungrier for volume than finesse.

Fan predictions need to bear this in mind. Adults don’t bestow grown-up status on a book simply by reading it. The book remains unchanged; it is the adult who changes, indulging in at least temporary childishness.

Posted by at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t know how I got to thinking about top-level international chess tournaments, but I did. And I’ve got an idea to improve them.

From a design standpoint, chess is only a mediocre game. It deserves points for being one of the best board games available for over a thousand years, but that’s largely because there weren’t many games at all, much less good ones, before 1950. Increasing leisure time made games a viable business, and a few landmark games like Monopoly and Risk proved there was room beside the ancient giants: chess, Parcheesi, rummy/mah jong, nine men’s morris, and more.

Professional attention has produced a rich variety of board games, often by striking off into new territory, but usually by refining existing concepts. 221B Baker Street, for example, improved on Clue by eliminating the pointless dead time spent walking between rooms and sticking strictly to the process of reasoning out the solution. Pente improved on tic-tac-toe by extending the board and by adding a rule for captures, deepening strategic depth; optimal play is no longer so easy that every ten-year-old can play a perfect game. Settlers of Catan captures the essence of Monopoly trading while removing any chance for a reluctant trader to create a game-wide stalemate.

It is in this improved sense of game design that chess begins to look…well, clumsy. It’s not a badgame; it has strategic depth, at least. Unfortunately, climbing the learning curve to the point where you can appreciate that depth is a long painful process. The rules for moving the pieces are arbitrary and difficult to learn. The two-space pawn move, specifics of castling, and capturing en passant are particularly opaque, and occasionally cause even experienced players trouble. The distinction between capturing the king and checkmate is silly. Worse, the arbitrary and unintuitive nature of the rules creates a vast gulf between knowing how to play and knowing how to play well.

Numerous variations on chess, collectively called “fairy chess,” have appeared over the ages, introducing new pieces, changing the board’s size or shape, or even more creative ideas. One intriguing version—missile chess—gives every piece the ability to capture once in the game to capture a piece, without moving from its current space, any piece it could capture in the normal fashion. (If you’d like to try this, keep track of each piece’s “missile” by placing a checker underneath it until fired.)

Chess has no inherent design advantage to fairy chess, or to related games like Chinese chess and shogi; often it is technically inferior to its variations. Proper chess persists only because so many people already play it. It’s easier to find a chess opponent than to find someone willing to play, say, Smess, a version of fairy chess where movement is governed by arrows on the spaces of the board, rather than the pieces’ inherent ability. The learning curve is steep, but you can find innumerable books to help you past that curve; no such library exists for even popular games like Scrabble and Diplomacy, and no library exists at all for games which aren’t household names. Similarly arcane games are quickly forgotten, but chess persists because a lot of people are already committed to chess. Chess is the Windows OS of the game world.

Chess is a game of complete information, that is, all players know at all times the complete state of affairs in the game. No chance elements like cards or dice exist to surprise the players, nor do players hide game elements from one another, as they do in poker. In theory, one could produce a complete analysis of chess by brute force, cataloguing every possible position and every possible move. In practice, this is impossible because of the sheer quantity of positions to examine. For amateur play, this is not a problem, as no player could possibly perform a meaningful fraction of the necessary analysis of a given position.

For professional play, however, this is a problem. World-class play depends heavily, not on native talent, but on an encyclopedic knowledge of every variation of the first fifteen or twenty moves, and a wide knowledge of variations beyond that. Given that most games end within thirty or forty moves, and that games that end in a victory (instead of a draw) are usually determined by an early mistake, we are not so much watching talented chess players as watching very large memories at work, demonstrating the extent of their knowledge of a huge algorithm. A complete analysis is still out of our reach, but a team of experts, accompanied by some powerful computers, can produce a meaningful portion of one that no player, not even the world champions, could produce on their own. When the stakes are high enough, as they were in the celebrated Fischer-Spassky tournament in Reykjavik, or in the more recent Kasparov-Big Blue showdown, the competition is at least partially removed from the hands of the players themselves, and instead invested in a whole team of experts. These teams don’t just operate between games; at times, games will be halted overnight, and these teams will work out winning strategies for their champion while the game is still in progress. In these cases, we’re not even watching the players any more; we’re watching the pure results of an algorithm reaching a fixed conclusion. Watching this kind of chess is no more interesting than watching a tic-tac-toe tournament, and for much the same reason.

So here’s where my suggestion comes in. If we really want to see chess talent, as opposed to rote knowledge, in action, tournament chess must be made less predictable. The chess game itself must remain one of complete information, or the whole appeal of a contest of pure intellect is lost. But the tournament itself could be made unpredictable, by employing fairy chess. Before every world match, or even before each game in the match, establish a variation on the basic chess rules, and require the players to use that variation. All the rote memorization of openings would be useless; so, too, computer analysis, which could never be generated in time; the adaptivity which is the essence of true gaming skill (and, indeed, of intelligence generally) would come to the fore.

Posted by at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I can’t claim credit for the idea of a program to recover cheese from the moon; it cropped up in a discussion on the Well about the general capacity of Rove, Delay, Cheney, Bush, et al. to claim black is white and vice versa, and of too many people to accept such claims without question. A fellow poster complained that he fully expected a Republican-led initiative to recover green cheese from the moon any day now. My offering got some cheers from the admittedly partisan forum, so I thought it worth sharing:

Anything Bush the lesser does is good.

Bush the lesser invaded Iraq.

Ergo, invading Iraq was good.

When no reason to invade Iraq could be found, we simply repeated loudly and often that reason existed nevertheless, although it couldn't be shared--with anyone--for security reasons. This proved sufficient to justify an invasion. Ergo, bald assertion that something is good is equivalent to the feasibility and necessity of any policy to pursue that result.

Anything Ronald Reagan did was good.

Ronald Reagan distributed cheese.

Ergo, distributing cheese is good.

Ergo, any policy designed to distribute cheese is feasible and necessary.

Recovering cheese from the moon for distribution is a policy designed to distribute cheese.

Ergo, recovering cheese from the moon is feasible and necessary.

If, however, no cheese is found on the moon, it must have been stolen, in violation of international treaties.

Only evil people steal.

Terrorists are evil people.

Ergo, if no cheese is found on the moon, terrorists stole it all, in violation of international treaties.

If terrorists claim they did not steal the cheese from the moon, it is because they are sneaky, lying, evil, godless, religious fundamentalists. But trust us, they definitely are hiding the cheese somewhere. This is a slam dunk.

A massive military effort will be necessary to uncover it. We will let you know where when the public's attention becomes dangerously distracted from the importance of our vital national
cheese reserves. Probably right about the time the Democrats distract national attention from
our vital cheese reserves by playing politics with minor issues like the budget, war, and the Bill of Rights.

Posted by at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So Bush delivered his progress report on the “surge” in Iraq. He was too optimistic by half, suggesting that progress is half-complete: by his accounting, eight of the eighteen objectives have been met (read: if you squint, you can pretend what we have is what we had in mind when we set the objectives), two have had debatable success (read: failure), and eight remain unfulfilled (read: no amount of spin can make this look good). This, in itself, is no proof of failure. As the president pointed out, the final report is due in September, and judging progress before the agreed date to judge progress would be unfair. This will not stop anyone.

I took particular note of his explicit statement that “Congress has the right to fund” the ongoing war in Iraq. Conspicuously, he did not mention that Congress has the constitutional authority not to fund it, as well (Article I, Section 9, item g.), but the tacit recognition, at least, was there.

As so often happens, the reporters in the subsequent round of questions missed a big opportunity by asking the questions they had prepared, instead of addressing this statement. The $64,000-dollar question was:

“You just stated that Congress has the right to fund the ongoing war in Iraq. Presumably, you recognize their right not to do so as well. If Congress should decide not to continue funding the war to a level you consider necessary for its successful prosecution, what policy will you adopt towards our involvement in Iraq. Please note, Mr. President, that the question is not whether Congress should continue funding operations in Iraq; no doubt you feel they should, and must. The question is what you will do if, despite your insistence, they choose not to.”

The value of this question is twofold. Presuming the president answered the question at all, it would force him to put his cards on the table, one way or another. He could admit, after all previous refusals to a condition that could compel him to withdraw. He could deny Congress the legal ability to refuse. He could indicate a willingness to ignore the constitution and draw funds from the treasury without the consent of law. He could indicate a willingness to leave troops there without sufficient support. None of these options would be pleasant for the president, but it’s well past time for the no-win situation he has created in Iraq to become a no-win situation for himself, personally, and not just for the US generally, or for Iraq, or for whichever president is left to clean up his mess.

The other value of the question is that the answer would also light a fire under Congress, forcing them to lay their cards on the table, one way or another. An answer would either supply Congress with conditions to end the war, if they’ve got the guts, or unequivocal grounds for impeachment and removal from office of the president. If justice is to be done, Congress has to start fighting back. And we, the voters, need to hold them accountable for their reaction to the Bush agenda. We’ve already blown our chance to hold Bush himself accountable. Now we must rely on our elected officials, afraid of the next elections, to do it for us.

Posted by at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While flipping through a book called Oops!, I came across this story:

In the 1960s editors of the Chinese Communist quarterly National Construction wanted to make it clear that China under Chairman Mao could in no way be confused with Germany under Adolf Hitler. They pointed out the striking dissimilarities between the two men:

“Adolf Hitler was 5 feet, 6 inches tall and weighted 143 pounds. He was renowned for his spellbinding oratory, relations with women, and annihilation of a minority people. In his last years, he suffered from insanity and delusions of grandeur. Chairman Mao is taller and heavier.”

So. File that under the same heading as the self-incriminating spam I’ve been getting. The very idea that someone decided it was necessary to point out differences in the first place speaks volumes. But my point is that there’s something very current about this denial, like the women/coffee game.

Did I lose you? Okay, there’s a parlor game of my own invention, inspired by a “Bob and Dave” comic strip, in which Dave claims to like his women like he likes his coffee: cold, black, and bitter. Bob claims he likes his women like he likes his shoes: loose and smelly, with their tongues hanging out. The last two panels are much the same. The challenge of the women/coffee game is to take any given noun and turn it into a three-point comparison to the kind of women someone may like, ideally without pausing to think your way through it.

Now, apply this basic mechanic to the leader of the free world. Name any sorry excuse for a human being, past of present. List several defining qualities of this blemish on humanity. Then add the line: “George Bush is taller and heavier.” Ta-dah! Instant political commentary.

Charles Manson was 5’7” and 140 pounds. [Taken from his 1967 driving license.] He was the center of a personality cult that robbed banks and committed a string of brutal murders, taking a cue from his incoherent babblings. Called to task for his own crimes and those of his followers, he denied all responsibility, although he embraced the behavior as sensible. George Bush is taller and heavier.

Posted by at 9:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s a bit of excitement here: something I wrote is going to GenCon, the premier national convention for role-playing games (and, to a lesser extent, other games).

This, in itself, is not much of an accomplishment. GenCon is open to all with the cash, time, and transportation. All anyone needs to do is write an adventure, then sign up and run it. The accomplishment is in getting someone else interested enough to run it. And, in this case, that someone is a name.

Greg Stolze is a significant figure in the RPG biz. He’s written or co-written three significant games (Godlike, Feng Shui, and Unknown Armies) and written major supplements to the World of Darkness, along with a number of less significant works.

One of these lesser-knowns is his game "Executive Decision," a LARP-y little production that places 3-7 players in the role of US President and members of his cabinet. At the beginning of play, a crisis erupts, and the president, advised by the Veep, the Chief of Staff, and the Cabinet, has one hour to select from a limited list of ways to respond to the crisis. Periodically, breaking information on the crisis is introduced, which may change the debate over which response to adopt.

The president is entirely neutral in these decisions, ultimately accepting his advisors’ counsel as best he can. The cabinet, by contrast, is not at all neutral. Apart from the president, every player has one or more agenda, such as increasing the budget and status of the military or reducing spending on health care, and will attempt to talk the president into a selection that promotes these agenda. Because the scenarios are designed to put these agenda at cross purposes, debate should be lively; the president has the secondary job of stirring up debate if consensus is reached too easily. At the end of the hour, a decision is made, the appropriate envelope is opened, and the political results of the decision read. Players score according to whether the decision promoted or hampered their agendas; the actual impact on the American people is irrelevant.

As of this writing, the only official "Executive Decision" scenarios are the original five to come with the rules. Discovering that Stolze would be willing to publish another set if he could get them, I wrote up one of my own. His response, and I quote: “Hot damn!” He intends to run it at GenCon. (Ideally, he hopes to print up the text without reading it himself, so that he can participate.) Naturally, I’m pleased as punch, and sent off two more. If the demo goes well, you may soon see my name in official RPG print.

For more on Executive Decision, see Stolze’s web page at www.gregstolze.com, in the “downloads” section. While you’re there, have a look around. I rather like the ingenious mechanic for “…In Spaaace!”

Posted by at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We watched the fireworks along with everyone else on Wednesday. This year, we watched from a distance, because Mom’s foot is all bandaged up after some minor surgery, and walking from a parking space to the “front row” seats would have been too much. And that was okay, although we couldn’t feel the chest-thumper percussion fireworks, and the sounds of explosion were a little out of sync with the radio accompaniment. Perhaps the physical distance was responsible for my emotional distance from the patriotic display, but I don’t think so. I think, instead, I wasn’t prepared to join in.

This was the first year, ever, that I didn’t feel patriotic swellings to match the fireworks. Our national leaders have ruined our international standing, politicized our courts, politicized election oversight, emptied the treasury, launched an unjust war, weakened our military, profited personally from each of these transgressions, ignored its citizens’ constitutional rights, endangered public servants to punish dissent, and above all have done everything possible to eliminate government accountability to the voters for its actions, and their own accountability to anyone for anything. The opposition has shown no will to resist, much less reverse, these profound threats to America, even after winning a majority in congress, and are now preparing to lose again in 2008. The news media have tamely abandoned their role as political watchdogs.

We, the people, don’t care enough to stop it.

I love my country, and I am proud to be an American. But never have I loved it less, or been less proud. Instead of stirring my pride, this year’s fireworks made me conscious of our collective shame.

Posted by at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)