Posts by Robin

You have no doubt seen the Bygone Bureau’s excellent round-up of the best new blogs of 2009 with contributions from everyone Snarkmarket admires. Three notes:

First: All hail Joanne McNeil and her 749 feeds. This is, by the way, the correct use of Google Reader. It’s not an email inbox… it’s baleen.

Second: I like Andy’s mention of Offworld, because it’s a video game blog that did what the very best journalism does: not just track an existing conversation but start a whole new one. Offworld’s focus on indie games and crazy ludology is as much a sustained argument as it is a chronicle.

Third: My favorite new blog of 2009 is… Twitter. It’s remarkable how much it’s changed this year—for me, at least. It went from being a pleasantly random feed of banter to, really, the locus of my internet life. When I open a browser, I fire up Twitter in the first tab—even before Gmail. Wow!

Matt mentioned that he’s playing Dragon Age: Origins, and now I am, too. And I just played through a scene in the game that I thought was worth reporting:

So you come to this village that’s being attacked every night by waves of shambling undead; they emanate from the dark castle set on high cliffs above the town. Many villagers have been killed, and those who remain are huddled in the church. Everybody is freaked out and fatalistic. They think tonight’s attack is going to be the one that finally wipes them out. It’s grim.

So you promise to help, of course (and you need to get into that castle for your own reasons). But here’s where it gets interesting: Instead of fade-to-black and then the big fight, you spend the next portion of the game exploring town, convincing and cajoling villagers to help you:

• The blacksmith wants to drown his sorrows in booze and wait for the end to come; you convince him to repair the village militia’s battered weapons instead.
• Three selfish mercenaries have boarded themselves up in a house to ride out the attack; you browbeat them into the joining the fight.
• A skilled archer is skulking in the shadows of the inn; he feels he has no stake in the battle. You uncover his secret and blackmail him into joining.
• The knights remaining in the village want blessings of protection from the church. But in a twist, the church elder is all like, “Are you kidding me? Blessings won’t help them fight.” You convince her that anything that helps morale, even if it’s just an illusion, is essential.

And so on. There are supplies you can discover and traps you can lay. But here’s the important thing: You can fail at any of it! You can say the wrong things or overlook people altogether. Or you can choose to skip it all—to face the undead horde friendless and alone.

Rio Bravo or High Noon. It’s your choice.

The nuance and humanity of this section really surprised me. So did the flexibility. There was not the usual feel-good fait accompli; not all roads led to a band of brave villagers fighting at your side. You could pretty easily screw things up and alienate people!

And this whole complicated little episode is, of course, like 0.5% of this entire game. It’s still too early to render judgment, but so far, Dragon Age is on track to be the best-written, the subtlest, video game I’ve ever played.

If you follow my other feeds (Twitter, robinsloan.com), you’re going to be sooo sick of this by now—but most of you don’t, so let me point you to some fun Friday reading: a very short story inspired by a pair of pants.

Not to be grandiose (I mean, it is a very short story), but there’s actually a larger idea at work here.

The meta-inspiration was an idea that Geoff at BLDGBLOG threw out a while ago. It went something like this: How about fiction commissioned specifically for a new building? Imagine it: There’s a swank new apartment tower going up, and the developers pay a writer to compose a book of short stories about it. (It would be great arbitrage: a fortune in writer-terms is a pittance in developer-terms.) When you move in, there’s a crisp, limited-edition copy of that book waiting on your polished-concrete kitchen counter. The action is all set in and around the building: characters move in and out of spaces you recognize. They walk down your street, shop at your grocery store. They have the same view out their window that you do!

Why do I like this? Well, one of the things writers need desperately, I think—especially writers of short fiction—is new venues, new contexts. General-interest magazines used to provide one (I guess?); the internet sort of provides one now, but honestly, a short story on the internet can be pretty random. The most vital venue for short fiction today is probably, uh, school. Which is fine if you’re in the 7th grade, but what about the rest of us? How do you ground a story and—here’s the crux of it—give people a reason to read? (And, optionally, how do you support the creation of new fiction? Where does the money come from?)

So, as one of many possible solutions, I really love this idea of hooking a story to something in the real world, whether it’s a new building or (in this case) a pair of pants. Imagine that you took this a step further, and the story actually came with the pants. You open the trademark blue-paisley Bonobos box that just arrived in the mail and there, folded neatly atop your new khakis: a short story to get you started, to fire up your imagination.

What if every product shipped with a story?

Imagine analogues in other media: an album composed with a new car in mind, and when you buy the car, the album is loaded into the stereo, waiting for you. (It’s fine-tuned for the car’s acoustics, natch!) Or a movie set in that swank new apartment tower—filmed after construction is complete but before people move in.

It’s fanciful, but I think it connects to the idea of a data shadow—the idea that every physical object has tons of metadata attached to it, cascading away from it—and expands it. That “metadata” can be more than, like, a stream of usage information. It can be narrative; it can, in fact, be fanciful. Call it a story shadow.

It happens naturally, of course. Think of New York City’s story shadow! It’s huge! It’s like, a fifth of all movies ever made! Most cities already have story shadows; some buildings do; relatively few products do. So really what we’re talking about is priming the pump: producing a starter story-shadow on the front-end. And I think done right—again, this is the whole point—it could give people new reasons to read new fiction.

Probably the best example of story-shadow engineering today is the super-awesome Significant Objects. I feel like you ought to be able to take what they’re doing and move it up the food chain—imagine a future for new objects, as well as a past for old ones.

Does this even make any sense? It’s one of, like, the top ten things I’m interested in these days—but I’m not sure I’ve figured out quite how to articulate it yet.

P.S. Ha ha, now here’s a reason to read. Dave Eisenberg from Bonobos chimes in and offers a discount to short-story readers!

I do not know that this is actually true:

Many types of classic jacket derive from a specific purpose. Trench coats have epaulettes so that dead or wounded soldiers can be dragged to safety.

However, I want it to be true, and will repeat it often, in an attempt to make it as-good-as-true.

This multi-faceted post on security—from physical to digital and back—by Tim Maly is terrific.

The practice of locking the front door baffles me. It seems to me that, if you lock your front door, you are saying you believe that, at some point, someone will come along and jiggle your door-knob. Someone will give it a try. And I just can’t believe that’s the case. I mean, what, do villains just cruise down the block, jiggling door-knobs in sequence? Of course they don’t!

Now, you could say no, that’s not it at all; instead, locking the front door is a ritual we all perform which provides a general assumption of front-door-locked-ness. Almost like vaccination. One person does it, it’s meaningless; everybody does it, it’s a big deal. And also like vaccination because, once everybody does it, you largely get the benefits even if you don’t!

Locking the front door as collective action. Hmm. I still don’t think it makes any sense. I still do it.

This is, no question, my favorite new genre: the production-as-performance video. This is Pomplamoose’s Single Ladies cover, which is probably the paragon of the form so far:

Characteristics of the pro/per video:

☑ Normal duds, normal environment. No spandex, no fog machine.

☑ Gear. Lots of it.

☑ Subdivision of the video frame: overlapping tracks visualized as overlapping views.

☑ Performance! This isn’t just a hidden camera in the studio. It’s natural, it’s unpretentious—but it’s still a performance.

(In some ways, this newer Pomplamoose video is an even better example of the pro/per form, but the music is not as perfectly ear-tickling, so stick with Single Ladies.)

What I love about the approach is that it’s showing us a complicated, virtuoso performance, but making it really clear and accessible at the same time. It’s entertaining, but it’s also an exercise in demystification—which of course is exactly the opposite objective of every music video, ever. Their purpose has been to mystify, to masquerade, to mythologize in real-time.

Even live performance videos mystify in their own way: “Jeez, how did they get so good?” What I appreciate about the pro/per, at least in Pomplamoose’s hands, is that it acknowledges: Yes, to make music, you need a lot of tools, and you need a lot of tries. And I really like (maybe even need) the notion that things can be assembled. They can be built from parts, improved piece-by-piece. You don’t have to do it right the first time through. That’s what Pomplamoose seems to be saying, and showing.

I know I’ve seen some other videos in this genre, but I can’t dig any of them up… and, ha ha, searching for “production as performance” on YouTube doesn’t get you anywhere. Can you think of any?

Consider a few things that are colliding, at this moment, in my brain.

Warm-up number one: The writer Michael C. Milligan is writing a novel in three days. Just as interestingly—maybe even more interestingly—Eli James over at Novelr is live-blogging the process. It starts on Tuesday.

Warm-up number two: If I get to $10,000 over at Kickstarter (I’m $76 away!) I’m going to write an entire short story on my flight to New York on Tuesday.

Warm-up number three: Alain de Botton as Heathrow’s writer-in-residence. You see him stalking the terminal, taking notes.

All together, these set up this sort of writing-as-performance vibe. The text alone is not the thing.

Now, here’s what’s really got me thinking: Google Wave has a playback feature. EtherPad‘s got it, too. This takes wiki-style document versioning a step further, or maybe a million steps further. It’s so much more granular! It goes keystroke by keystroke and attaches a time-stamp to each one. It records and recreates not just words and spaces, but confidence and hesitation.

So, skip past the obvious notion of playing back the creation of a standard short story or a novel. That’s fine; it makes me shiver, but it’s fine.

Think instead of a short story written with playback in mind. Written for playback. Typing speed and rhythm are part of the experience. Dramatic deletions are part of the story. The text at 2:20 tells you something about the text at 11:13, and vice versa. What appear at first to be tiny, tentative revisions turn out to be precisely-engineered signals. At 5:15 and paragraph five, the author switches a character’s gender, triggering a chain reaction of edits in the preceding grafs, some of which have interesting (and pre-planned?) side effects.

Talk about intertextuality.

I’m sure there are arty precedents (and if you know of any, I’d love to hear about them). But this feels like an interesting moment, simply because these are tools with (potentially) mass audiences. It’s possible that a lot of people are suddenly about to get a bit better at version-scrubbing, at understanding documents in time. And that means—maybe?—an audience for writing as real-time performance.

Paul Graham, whose writing I always enjoy, just posted a new piece about publishing and, to a degree, the structure of markets for content. I want to zoom in on one point:

What about iTunes? Doesn’t that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don’t make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that’s pretty easy with digital content.

I think this is a cheat—aren’t all stores just tollbooths, then? You never buy goods at cost. There’s a markup, a tax, associated with the aggregation, the curation, the experience. This is as true for a grocery store as it is for iTunes and the App Store. And you can see Graham’s anti-iTunes argument sort of fuzz out as the paragraph proceeds: It starts very specific, then breaks down into a restatement of that old information-wants-to-be-free digital determinism.

But that’s not the point I want to make. Rather, it’s that almost all of this discussion—not just Graham’s, but the broader conversation it’s part of—tends to operate from one of two extreme points of view: either that of the consumer (who wants convenience and economy) or that of the company (which wants big profits, or at least a business model). I find myself wanting—sort of desperately wanting—to hear from a different group: the creators.

And, this is as much of a surprise to me as anybody else, but finding myself more and more in that position—the position of somebody who wants to make content, and make money from that content—I see the Kindle Store and the App Store and I say: thank you.

Now listen, I understand all of the problems. I just got into another round of the iPhone: Is It Evil? conversation last night. (Our conclusion, same as always: yes, a little bit.) But if it’s not yet what we want it to be, at least it moves us in the right direction. In iTunes and the App Store, an individual creator can make something and offer it to the world for a small sum, and people will actually take her up on it. I wish that wasn’t so revolutionary… but it is!

Trust me, I get the argument for free. I love Kevin Kelly’s strategies for selling stuff in the age of command-D. Ransom model, hello?

But at the same time, I don’t want to give up on selling stuff quite yet. I don’t think the central lesson of the App Store is that people will suffer a tax if it’s small enough. Rather, I think it’s that people are happy to pay for things if it’s easy enough. And that’s especially true when those things aren’t the products of Super Amalgamated Content LLC, but rather of Indie Content Haus, or better yet, of your friend Matt.

If that’s true, then Paul Graham’s argument about iTunes leads us in the wrong direction. Digital determinism says it’s a tax, a toll booth, a tortured construct that denies the essential nature of digital content. Pragmatism says—without denying that there’s room for improvement—that it’s a joy, a gift, an opportunity engine.

Now, a question you could ask is this: Why isn’t iTunes proper—the music and video part—more like the App Store? The former is open to indies, but still dominated by big corporate media. The latter is open to big corporations, but dominated (so far) by indies. What’s different? How might you splice some of the App Store’s indie vigor into iTunes proper?

I think one strategy—which doesn’t really answer my question above—is to start thinking hard about how to blur the lines between software and content, and get some “content experience apps” (I promise never to type that again) into the App Store. (Paul Graham ends up saying something similar.) For whatever reason, as a market, it’s working for creators. So maybe it’s simply where creators—of many kinds—ought to go.

We’ve been talking a lot about the future of digitization, about how much digitization needs to improve, about the severe limits that digitization still imposes on many things—books, for instance.

So, here’s a change of pace. Here is the almost perfectly digitizable object, almost perfectly digitized.

Small objects, easy to photograph in their entirety? Check.

Defined number of important views? Check. (Obviously two.)

Standard set of metadata? Check. (And click on one of the images above to see an example.)

So, given the ideal material for a digital archive, the American Numismatic Society delivers. There’s a powerful search engine but their collection is pretty browsable, too. And, listen, I only collect coins that I intend to spend on the train, but I defy you not to get a little lost in these pages.

And every coin has its own stable permalink! Swoon!

The only thing missing is that you can’t heft the coins, feel their contours. Fair enough. But I’ll bet you could even generate 3D models from these images, using the depth information implied by the shadows. When I finally have a home 3D printer I’ll crank out some of these guys and send ’em around.

And you know, ancient coins are perfect tokens of historical imagination, especially when captured so crisply. They’re totally familiar but deeply strange. You can imagine keeping one in your pocket, feeling it in your hand.

Check these off the list. Now we just gotta get those books right.

This is a fun idea, and The Morning News’ execution of it is crisp and super-readable: What’s your hidden talent? Your… super power?

I liked this one, from Jessica Francis Kane:

You know how sometimes when you’re trying to pour something from one glass into another, the liquid mostly just runs back down the edge of the first glass and spills all over the counter? Well, not for me it doesn’t. Not a drop. I’m the daughter of a chemistry professor and this is my superpower. You have a half-pint you want to finish up in your pint glass so you don’t look like such a lightweight? I’m the one you need. The trick is speed, angle, and confidence. You have to go fast, not tip slowly. You have to hold the emptying glass high, not touch it to the lip of the filling glass. Maybe it’s a little thing, but aren’t superpowers what we make of them? Lots of very thirsty people have been grateful for my help.

So what’s yours? I’ll start: I can fall asleep on any airplane, in any position, in under two minutes. Flight is my ultimate soporific. Now, great powers sometimes come great cost, and to tell you the truth, I have a hard time staying awake on planes if I have to. But more often, this is a blessing. Mmmokay see you guys in New York. Zonk.