Posts by matt

You may not notice the improvements, but we’ve forgone posting the last few days to make the site a happier browsing experience for all. Firefox users will be stunned by the miraculous appearance of a logo at the upper left, while IE users can bask in their newfound ability to select text (try it, it’s fun!). Users of Netscape 4, however, which is no longer considered a “browser” under W3C standards, continue to suffer in the pit of despair.

You can now also search the site from the Snarkives.

Don’t stay up too late playing with the site, kids.

Skip this month’s sensationally-headlined Wired article “The Linux Killer.” But check out its sidebar, an article about how Linus Torvald’s laissez-faire approach to sourcing Linux is causing the enterprise legal headaches today.

To put Linux on more solid intellectual property footing in the future, the company has to become a little more corporate and a little less Dangermouse. It has to be a lot more meticulous about making sure all of its code is properly licensed to and by developers, keeping a thorough library of who-coded-what. In fact, the company may send Torvalds and the developers to re-write all the code that’s already been written, making sure to pull any proprietary code out of there.

My experiences with open-source technology have been dim so far. I tried working with OpenOffice for several months on my last computer, because Microsoft Works documents only work in MS Works and MS Office was too rich for my blood. The software just had an amateurish feel about it, it crashed my computer regularly, and the interface was unintuitive (it was a little too open-source; i.e., I felt like I had to code a macro to get it to register a carriage return). MS Word may be a fascist, irrational piece of crap technology that mucks up my documents twice as often as it improves them, but at least it deceives me into feeling I have a modicum of stability there.

Open-source browsers have been a mixed bag. There’s nothing wrong with Opera or Mozilla, per se, and especially on my old computer, I would go through weeks of heavy Opera usage, but the tangible advantages I would get from making them my primary browser and customizing them to fit snugly with Windows the way IE does (yes, yes, another proof that MS is eee-vil) seem small. It’s not all that inconvenient to me to download yet another patch to fix yet another gaping security flaw every few weeks. Ha ha.

I love the idea of open-source

I’ll spare you my review of Michael Moore’s crockumentary. Suffice it to say I mostly agree with Chris Hitchens. (I know, I know. I just washed my mouth out with soap.)

I am currently crossing my fingers for the dim, but newly existent, chance that someone has answered my prayers for a good adventure game for the Playstation 2.

Fahrenheit debuted at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, and according to scattered accounts, it completely knocks sliced bread off the map. It’s got a decent basic storyline — complete strangers in New York are killing each other at random, each enacting the same bizarre ritual before committing the murder — which you can actually affect depending on your actions in the game. (It starts, by the way, after you’ve just committed one of these random murders.)

And by affect, it apparently doesn’t just mean that you get the Murasame sword with seven jewels of power instead of five if you beat the silver-tongued Gorgon using only copper weapons. It seems there are serious game-shattering consequences for your actions. For instance, you could do one thing and play the game for four hours only to discover that the thing you did four hours ago completely screwed you, and now you’ve lost. Which has the possibility to be very frustrating, but if the game is dynamic enough to keep you playing, then it could also be very, very cool. From the review I linked above:

There is no inventory in the game, which is intended to add an element of realism. You

Previously on Snarkmarket: Why do influential world leaders have such ghetto e-mail addresses?

Today on Snarkmarket: Why do giant global organizations have such ghetto websites? I mean, OMFG. Forget Sudan, the United Nations website is clearly the world’s biggest humanitarian disaster.*

I’ve been complaining about a micro-version of this problem for some time now. Have you ever checked out the website of a member of your state government? It’s often sad. Here’s mine. This I don’t get as worked up about since more states started giving their legislators shiny, functional spaces under the umbrella of the state website. (Although even these can be fugly.)

I’ll grant that the UN website is probably an unimaginable morass of information. (I think the current ratio of people on earth to UN satellite programs is running roughly 1:3.) All the more reason not to design your site using 1-2-3 Publish.

*JOKE! Please don’t forget about Sudan. In fact, give money!

A coworker wanted to find out how far away Mexico City was from San Diego, CA, in miles. MapQuest and MapPoint gave the driving distance, but she needed to know the distance as the crow flies. A little Google-fu turned up this pretty cool distance calculator. Just in case you ever wanted to know.

Fifteen minutes into the movie Mean Girls, this woman strolls into the movie theatre, pressing an infant to her chest with one hand, and a cell phone to her ear with the other. She shuffles across an entire aisle full of people to get to her seat (which happens to be my aisle), crosses in front of me, then plops down right next to me to continue her conversation. The baby coos at me. I shoot a dirty look at it in the dark.

I could probably have tapped the woman on the shoulder and asked her to be quiet, ensuring two hours of mutual scowling awkwardness between us.

Or (I actually thought), if I wanted to do it guerilla-style, I could have discreetly turned on my SH066PL2A cell phone jamming device.

Sitting in the theater, I didn’t know whether such devices were commercially available, but listening to the woman babble, I thought, “Wow. What a retail coup that would be! Cell phone jamming!”

Some quick Google-fu reveals that, although illegal in the U.S., jamming is pretty popular across the Atlantic. This Slate article says it won’t stay underground for long, even here. (U.S. customers are the biggest foreign market for the personal jamming devices, according to the article.)

I think if I had access to such a technology, I couldn’t bring myself to use it. But I wonder. And I wonder what society will do when our ability to intrude on the “private” spaces of total strangers gets even more virtual.

This New Yorker article, essentially a hagiography of an Illinois politician, brought out in me a cynicism about the American political process I didn’t even know I had. The politician in question, Barack Obama, is half-black, grew up in Middle America, rose from modest circumstances to become a star at Harvard and teach law at UChicago, and claims to want to practice clean, civil, on-the-issues politics. Why am I so skeptical of this guy? Some grafs:

Abner Mikva told me,

I posted this to the Young Journalists listserv, and thought I’d ask you savvy, snarky young consumers of media as well:

Scroll through any of the numerous rants about the state of journalism you can easily find online, and it’ll likely be peppered with barbs about journalism “nowadays,” how the news media is “no longer” worthy of (fill in the unworthy thing). Search Google for the phrase “our media has become,” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Which is, to get to the point, that critics of the media reflexively conjure this golden age of journalism. If it exists, I’d love to know more about it. The uber-example of fantastic journalism that I always hear about is Watergate — the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Woodie and Bernie, etc. But were those isolated examples indicative of an entirely different age or attitude in journalism? Were they surrounded by similar shining cases of media-as-watchdog? And I can’t imagine that when the WaPo ran the Watergate series, millions of fans of Nixon weren’t decrying how evil, monomaniacal, liberal, sensationalistic, what-have-you, the media had become.

Is “nowadays” just a figure of speech?

I don’t think it can be argued that recent years have seen huge corporate consolidation among our traditional media outlets, and that journalism has in many ways suffered as a result, but it strikes me that the burgeoning power of non-traditional, independent media is beginning to act as a tremendous counterweight to that consolidation. (I don’t JUST mean blogs, either.) We’ve gotten to the point where our individual readers, who claim fealty to no company, have appointed themselves watchdogs of individual journalists, and these independent meta-journalists actually accrue sizeable audiences of their own, in some cases bigger than the audiences of many mid-sized dailies.

In other words, newspapers and local tv stations are experiencing increasing corporate consolidation, yes, but they’re also making up a smaller and smaller part of our media landscape, especially among our generation.

To push the question even further, can anyone point to ANY PRESS, in any country, at any point in history that truly fulfilled the ideal of the media as servant of the people, ethical watchdog, beacon of goodness, etc.? What is the ideal we’re striving for?

In Norway, I’m told (might be Sweden, might be the Netherlands), news companies demand far smaller profit margins from their products than our companies do here in America, and their papers are much more widely read. Correlation, not causation, of course, but is it that the media in Norway produces journalism that’s singularly excellent in all the world?

There are pockets of stunning media brilliance and bravado all over the world, in much more dangerous and corrupt quarters than America, where daring individuals publish their works on secret presses and distribute them under fear of death. But one can’t deny that there are numerous examples of powerful, courageous journalism in the pockets of America, too.

Here I am, checking out The New York Times’ multimedia feature on garden furniture design, when I come across the following paragraph:

The classic garden bench has been reinvented. Stones, near right, by Maya Lin are made of fiberglass-reinforced concrete in three sizes, $356 to $1,156; from Knoll, www.knoll.com…

WTWWJDF??! Maya Lin, the legend, the 20 year-old second-generation American girl who probably did as much as any other artist to catapult this country into the age of modern art, the paragon of artistic integrity who etched sorrow into smooth black stone, Maya Lin is designing garden furniture?!?

Oh, but it’s true. And it doesn’t end there.

Lin’s latest corporate work reflects the themes she has developed in her 20-year career. Her Winter Garden for American Express has a water wall that offers soothing sounds and a floor that undulates like a hillside meadow. The flowing spaces in her apartment for Peter Norton, founder of software maker Norton Utilities, can be zoned off with sliding partitions, much like a traditional Japanese house. Her wall in the lobby of the headquarters of the Principal Financial Group has a creek running through it, an open invitation to feel the flowing water.

Rolling hills inspired Lin’s curvilinear lounge chair, which also conforms to the contours of the human body. Non-Western objects, such as Chinese porcelain pillows and African headrests, were models for Lin’s collection for Knoll Inc., the office-furnishings maker. The collection, called Stones, consists of seats and a coffee table made of precast concrete.

Well, if I was a bit taken aback at first, I, for one, have already mellowed. The pictures of Lin’s unembellished artistry, paired with the soothing words and phrases of Corporate America — “Aveda,” “Principal Financial Group,” “curvilinear lounge chair” — have proved an opiate to my disquiet. After all, artists must make money, right? And it’s better, isn’t it, that the corporatists should have rolling oceanic sculptures for their art than gawky metallic polluto-machines made from the fledglings of endangered species? And with her line of lawn chairs, Lin’s art won’t just be for the elite, but available to the masses, which is a plus, right? Right?

Too bad while Robin’s in L.A. he won’t be able to catch the sold out performance of selected works from the score of the Final Fantasy video game series, by the L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

I’ve talked before about my love for Final Fantasy IV (II in US), but how could I get away without mentioning my love for its music? Before video games could signal emotion with actual, recognizable facial expressions (when “faces” were a few murky pixels on a 16-bit, or God forbid, 8-bit screen), the music heroically took the place of the visuals in directing us how to feel. This was usually a bad thing, of course — those midi files always teetered on the edge of being cloying and obvious.

But especially with the music of Nobuo Uematsu from Final Fantasy, the themes often had a beautiful subtlety to them. And I think Uematsu did some of his best work in Final Fantasy IV. The game’s story was so wonderfully over-the-top — it was honestly the apotheosis of epic in 16 beautiful bits. Pick a theme, any theme, it’s in there. The quest for ultimate knowledge — Adam and Eve and the Manhattan Project (“I am become death, destroyer of worlds”) — played itself out in Tellah’s quest for Meteo, the Spell to end all Spells, and the “King of Baron’s” pursuit of the sacred crystals. Folly of the elderly leads to the death of the young? You know, Daedalus and Icarus, Romeo and Juliet — look no further than Palom and Porom, the pint-size twin magicians who turn themselves to stone to save the other adventurers, or Anna and Edward, the young pair whose love is sacrificed to Tellah’s fury. Oh, and there’s a ton more — the quest for self-redemption, avenging the death of a parent, you name it.

My point is that the music had to be pretty nimble to handle all this drama. Uematsu had to go from Wagner to Brahms in the blink of an eye … and he did. Take, for example, what’s probably my favorite piece of video game music ever — the Red Wings theme. It’s an anthemic military march — in a minor key. Follow the melody as it crests and falls towards its sad, sweet high note, falls again into that ominous rat-tat-tat, then explodes into the dissonant, aggressive coda that doesn’t really resolve so much as suffer a heart attack. Once you’ve got a handle on that melody, check out where Uematsu reprises it in “Suspicion” and the beginning of “Cry In Sorrow.”

OK, I’m done showing you cheesy midi files. But clearly other people love Uematsu’s stuff, too. This isn’t the first time Nobuo Uematsu‘s work will be performed with instruments:

The first FINAL FANTASY symphony concert was held in Japan in February of 2002, performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. The sold-out concert led to a six-city, seven-show concert series titled “Tour de Japon – music from FINAL FANTASY -” which will be held this coming March and April throughout Japan. The Czech National Symphony Orchestra also performed some of Uematsu’s compositions in the Symphonic Game Music Concert held in Leipzig, Germany in 2002.

In February 2003, Uematsu formed a group called “The Black Mages,” producing a self-titled album composed of FINAL FANTASY battle music arranged in rock style. Uematsu himself performs as the keyboardist.

As video games have gotten better at feeding you emotions through graphics, sometimes even through rumble packs, the music tends more towards subtle tone-setting with occasional moments of pop/rock, which is probably the stuff the L.A. Philharmonic will be taking on.

Another example of undeniable masterpiece in video game music: the theme from the original Super Mario Bros.