Justin's Links

Mark sees Saddam's Throne

Mark Meadows, aka Pighed, is someone I've been seeing on and office since before the web had whiskers. Two young blokes scamming h'ors devors off the spilling-over tables of the internet plenty. PARC Anarchist-in-Residence proposed a pig-fucking art installation for my professional web conference art room. Beneath black-clawed hands painted crucified art on his warehouse wall, burning kerosene lantern snakebone necklace, interview and afterwards walking to sushi near San Francisco. Then after talking to recently released convicts, we shucked shellfish on the shores of dusty Austin.

More has more hunger than I do these days. As a painter, he lived in Paris. Then to Sri Lanka, and finally, recently, Iraq. Here is Mark, slipping into dark corners, comfortable for him, unseen by roving US forces keeping cameras like his out of Saddam's bathroom. He lurked successfully so far, and he's shared what he's seen with the web: Mark Meadows in Iraq.

Early Election Size-Up: Howard Dean

I love following politics. In my teens, reaching out through all of Hunter S. Thompson's works, through Hell's Angels, past Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I discovered Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Frenzied chronicling of the great hopes of the liberals, wound up that year around McGovern, and McGovern's brilliant campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz. Thompson's expert antipathy for scheming, mistrustful Nixon was amusing and prescient.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 inculcated a admiration of the political process in me. The pageantry, the scheming, the high-speed media research and spin. In high school, I volunteered with my brother to do cold-calling potential democratic voters in New Hampshire on behalf of a Nebraskan Democratic presidential hopeful, Senator Bob Kerry. I didn't have much of a stake back then, I was more curious about the process. "Hello, I'm calling from campaign headquarters, will you be voting for Bob Kerry today?"

I have a hard time forming alliances - most people and parties are too complex to back whole-heartedly. But I admire the process-disruptors. Ross Perot with his crazy-talk. John McCain and his odd integrity. Often these people don't have much of a chance of winning, but they give the slicksters a hard time and change the overall tone of the campaign.

During the last election, I went to see Ralph Nader give a talk in Oakland. People in that auditorium wanted to see the creation of a viable American green party with more radical ideals. Now it seems some of that energy from the liberal side of the discussion has coalesced around Howard Dean, in large part because he's outside of the compromising part of the Democrats, those people used to effective business in Washington. Howard Dean is from Vermont, which is a state seemingly populated by a higher percentage of independent voters. He didn't like the war in Iraq, and he doesn't like Bush's tax cut.

At the democratic debate in South Carolina he was uncompromising to the point of hilarity. I enjoyed very much his performance, especially in contrast to the conciliatory old buzzards he was mostly up against. Though as Jon Stewart pointed out, he did have a strikingly odd smile on his face at times.

Today I was heartened by this New Republic article, Campaign Journal: Dean.com, sent by fellow Dealership fan Ivy Clift. It appears that Howard Dean, or rather, Howard Dean's campaign manager Joe Trippi is making steady use of the internet, grassroots style. Howard Dean web-coordinated meetups. Howard Dean microdonations. Howard Dean interviews with bloggers. Howard Dean official weblog.

Bully for him. I'm all in favor of citizen outreach. Maybe he can parlay the admiration of web surfers into American's version of Korea's Roh Moo-hyun. Or at least invest webloggers in the political process, by demonstrating respect for their potential as opinion-makers.

Financial Potential

Jane and I work as freelance communicators. We have some regular writing assignments, and we write often for her web site, Game Girl Advance. Sometimes we give speeches; seldom for money.

We don't have any institutional infrastructure - we are our support staff. I am the technical support guy. I also handle travel arrangements. Jane is the academic liaison, book reader, and more-frequent caterer. I am the chauffeur.

Neither one of us is really an accountant. Or a health insurance advisor. Or a tax expert. As excited as I can get about helping people with a vision for their lives and their careers, it can be hard to maintain vision for myself, especially when I'm distracted by needing to find health care, feeling overwhelmed with expenses, and hustling just to keep up regular income.

So I want to put out a solicitation for some professional help. Maybe these are separate jobs; either way, I think our success as freelance communicators hinges critically upon the piece of mind we could get by consulting the following sorts of expertise:

I want someone to help me get a handle on my expenses and my potential to earn money. I use the word potential purposefully - I want an accountant with vision. Not so much like the accountant in Grand Theft Auto 3: Vice City - I don't need advice on cocaine shipments or offshore tax shelters. I want someone, a peer, to look over the work that I'm doing and advise me on long term growth strategies. Growth strategies, saving money on taxes, budgeting better for the long haul, maybe even some investment. Some dry accounting - Quicken-type stuff (I run the software myself, but not very well). And if they know it, I'd love some health insurance consultation.

I know there are people who offer this sort of vision. I've met them. But most of them are pretty far distant from me, culturally. Anyone working as a sort of freelance digital citizen coach?

wake up together

Jane and I wake up together. Usually I wake up first (I fall asleep easier, wake up harder). I come downstairs, put on some hotwater, or make Jane some coffee. I sit down at my computer. She follows about a half an hour later. We sit, mostly silent, at our computers. Sometimes she's in my office with me, sometimes she's in the living room.

This is the baseline for our life. Cooperative productivity - writing. And then, after a few hours of that, we have cooperative play - games and reading and talking. I've never had this kind of working relationship before, and it is exciting, exhilarating, sometimes frustrating, rewarding.

Imagine all the stimulation you might get from many screens of digital media. Then imagine living with another person. And working with that person. The latter is much more involving! How to work effectively? How to respect their wishes? How to draw boundaries? How to maintain love and admiration? Every day, all day long. Those are engaging issues. So I live and work with Jane, in an environment saturated with electronic entertainment and occasional travel. This is thrilling to the tips of my fingers and this is what I write about or work to transmit through my writing here and elsewhere.

For a Day

Yesterday my email and web site disappeared from the 'net. Rather than take that as a sign that I should relax, lift my head up from the screen, breathe deep, and enjoy local humanity, I struggled hard to recover my information saturation and processing facility.

Bud.com is a domain I registered in 1994. I use it for email, and I host a casual group web share there. The DNS - the location information about that computer, was stored on a server in Los Angeles I have no access to. That LA server game address information for a Cyborganic machine that will no longer be on the net in a few days. That Cyborganic computer pushed Bud.com email delivery information to a third computer, where I check my email and edit my web site. As it turns out, Bud.com is hosted on a fourth computer.

Just sorting out the chain of command between computers on the internet was a reimmersion education for me in the specific architecture of the system we use to meet each other. Kind Brendan on the phone to me helped bolster my confidence. And finally I changed my own TinyDNS and so rejoined the electronic conversation once more.

A side effect? The half-dozen aliases I have had pointing at my email inbox for seven years or more are gone. link@justin.org, speak@justin.org, biz@justin.org, html@justin.org, sex@justin.org, advice@justin.org, cause@justin.org - these are email aliases I had set up to sort my mail back in 1996, and haven't used effectively since 1999. These days they were mostly dumping daily spamloads into my correspondence.

So this morning, when I came back, to see if the Internet knew my new address, I had massively reduced my spam. For a day. Anyhow, here's my email address.

Duelling Scientists

Here's a new experience for this working journalist -

I'm on assignment for TheFeature to write about mobile phones and corporate social responsibility. Some people believe there are harmful side-effects stemming from the use of mobile phones. Those people are trying to fight the rapid planting of new cellular antennae.

There have been thousands of studies on the effects of mobile phone radiation. As I was interviewing both mobile antenna makers and activists, each side recommended me to talk with their scientists. The mobile industry had scientists saying there was no harm, the activists had scientists who said look out - mobile radiation could be frying your parts.

So I tracked down two of these guys, one from each side, and asked them a few questions over email. The industry-recommended guy was friendly, a good storyteller, generous with his information. The activist-recommended scientist responded curtly, with suspicion, finally sending me a short summary of his research.

Then this morning, each of them continues the correspondence. I forward the industry-recommended guy the report written by the activist scientist, to ask for his opinion. He replies with information refuting the claims of the article and following up on the track-record of the activist scientist. Unbidden by me, the activist scientist emails to explain that he is the victim of a mobile industry-smear campaign.

A web search on their names and the issues at hand reveals this article "Smells Like Smoke," which is attributed to Meg McGinity from Ziff-Davis, but it only exists online today as it has been reprinted on anti-antennae activism sites. The journalism seems sound there - she's done a thorough examination of the parties and the history and the inevitable comparisons to tobacco.

In all my brief work as a journalist, I don't think I've written about a subject that has such bitter disagreement. Never have I had two people emailing me at once to debunk each other and claim a conspiracy of debunking. Must be high stakes.

As I was working on it, trying to cover all these issues, I realized I was rewriting a portion of my thesis from college. Back then I explored "Technology and Citizen Choice" - how people are able to control and not to control the devices and technologies that surround them. People who want to control the placement of mobile phone antennae remind me of people who want to control fluoride in water, or mandatory vaccination for schoolchildren. What if a very small segment of the population is susceptible to dramatic, sad side-effects of society-mandated technologies? How do we secure their well-being and still proceed with our paving? And what if, in the end, they're right, and we can't survive the results of our cybernetic mutations?

This article won't be posted for another week or two; in the meantime, Jane and I finished this piece describing the lessons mobile phone game developers have for the videogames industry.

E303

With news and fears of SARS in the air, GameSpy offered the most timely, if indelicate, promotional item - the GameSpy branded surgical face mask.

Photos from E3, to accompany Kentia - Where Gamers Fear to Tread

Event videographer Ryan gives a funny frown from the backseat on the long drive down from Oakland to Los Angeles.	Hail to Sony's PlayStation 2 "Eye Toy" a simple camera that turns your physical gestures into game interface. The gameplay is reminiscent of Zack Simpson's Shadow Garden. Here I'm raising my arms to hold off invading ninjas. Ryan took this picture just before he exchanged fists with a computer boxer.	This is Dre, a televisual game reporter from Amsterdam. Jane and I met him sharing a cab from the Player's Village at the World Cyber Games in Daejon. Here, he's wearing a shirt that reads "Fuck the Police" in Arabic.
Award for wackiest peripheral at the show goes to Ideazon's Zboards - custom modular keyboards. For $20 you can get a keyboard that has special buttons just for your favourite game. Pictured here are keyboards for Civilization, Age of Mythology, Madden 2003 and Medal of Honor.	A dancer weilds a sword during a traditional Korean drum dance at the Mu: Continent of Legend booth. Afterwards, a somewhat engaged hostess explained the game to the audience. "There are four playable character-classes in Mu." Then she would immediately follow with a question: "How many playable character-classes are there?" If you responded correctly, you won a keychain. I got my second guess right.	Writer and MMOG economy harvester Julian Dibbell looks weary as Pikachu spreads the Poké-love in the Nintendo booth.
Ryan snoozes under a table in the media room while Jane works on a deadline piece on mobile phone games at E3 for TheFeature.com.	Artiste Randy Smith couldn't keep his hands off the matches at the Cat & Fiddle pub Friday night. Alex lurches in the background.	Jay Kim was our best host in Korea. He was picked up as a panelist on "Smart Games" for E3 and could be seen striding the halls with a smile, introducing new friends to old friends, and acting as a gracious delegate for the Korean educators he travelled with. Jay is a former high school teacher who is working for Interesting & Creative Inc. on "Demiurges" a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that teaches basic gradeschool content to school children in Korea. I wrote about this game in a piece for Edge.org in January.
David, Silvio and Souris. Silvio and Souris are good friends of good friends. After some work in games and magazines and investment, these three are establishing their own game design studio in NYC called Invasiv.	Souris's family Edward and Sharon, a writer and artist respectively, opened up their Santa Monica backyard for a Saturday afternoon BBQ. Why? "Because Souris taught me that kids under 40 can be cool, so now I want to meet them," Edward replied.	Justin hugs Jane who lays on Doug and Robin in bed with Bernie, fronted by Brian. Late night, Saturday. Two of these people missed their planes home that morning so we celebrated with some raunchy jokes.

Ticketing

I paid four parking tickets today. I had a stack of them sitting around for the last few weeks and I finally got to my computer and my stamps and pens to fill them out and send them in before their costs multiplied.

Four parking tickets from four different places. Los Angeles, where I parked at an angle between a dumpster and a curb in a stinky back alley to save $20 in costly conference center parking (ticket: $35). Stanford University, where I missed my meter by two minutes but said nice things to the traffic control officer anyhow.

The surprise? Only Berkeley allowed me to pay my ticket over the web. That was painless and intelligent. Santa Clara county, seat of the microchip technology revolution, offers only mail-in payment. San Francisco, formerly a web maven haven, allows payment by credit card, but only by phone, and only with a $2.75 convenience fee. Humph.

Kissing Gonzalo

Jane and I met a gentleman we're both fond of - Gonzalo Frasca of Ludology. His is the best web site tracking developments in academic studies of games; academic with an attitude!

He's from Uruguay; he's founded a game development studio there. He brought us each a present - a bright beautiful red and pink scarf for Jane, and for me a small gourd followed out and lined with metal for drinking Yerba Mate. We didn't bring him squat. "Don't worry, that is the custom of my country," he assured us, "Now everyone from Uruguay will hate you."

We were touched, so we gave him a kiss:

Arrivee

In Los Angeles. Remembering Versailles fantasies of chicken bursting with butter garlic smell and shreds of pork. My belly full of greasy foreign dreams. Media arteries clogged if I can't navigate by electroculture - the signs are lit up by sunshine and I can't see past Vin Diesel into my own future.

It's an unfamous part of Los Angeles we've discoverd. The houses are small and unvarnished the ccars unremarkable and well maintained. Vegetation has been allowed to grow just a bit too much, bringing land within reach of our car now loaded with five culture makers stuffed in three bodies. We debate our place here. I remember vampires. We spin in circles at the top of a hill, making donuts in a small car with a steering wheel festooned indian.

But then we turn a corner and we see style again. Fine homes that boast of peace. That with money and wood siding we could see our way past bills and failure. I debate these things these days. Can I make children in this world as I live? All styles are acceptable. Snatch it baby, like you live, aw what Sister Ray says.

I've been writing on the web for so long I've forgotten how to sell words. Jane constantly corrects my grammar. I'm just looking for art in human endeavor and realizing that all our hours add up to few projects unless you're in the business of funding your friends. But the concentration of wealth into dispersable chunks does fuel rarified culture and children with no pride.

Sometimes I realize I would live better if I could rip out my pride, fingers at my own throat, gasping kneeling on the sidewalk pull out the push I have to live different. All that I have in me that looks past all that I have love already. Just seconds after that time I get my spirit fingers back, and I see that with pride lost I could reach and hold all that our culture values - power in freedom, cultural slack. My pride restored.

Jane walked on Ryan's back as he let out some long low satisfied groans. This on the grass in Griffith park, where we recovered from our lengthy car-time.

Jane mocked my convertible short-pants after I unzipped the legs and left them gathered down around my ankles like a Tokyo girl or anime character.

Game Effects

I posted an essay version of a short talk I gave at an Austin Game Developers' meeting in March: "How Has Inventory Management In Computer Role-Playing Games Affected The Way I Pack?" It's one way of phrasing the question: how have videogames affected me as a person? Which is part of a broader inquiry: does a group of people with deep experience playing videogames solve problems differently? Or engage in different sorts of relationships?

This is a personal question for me; it's also a generational question affecting people who grew up with game devices plugged in to their TVs. Even if people didn't play much, I'm beginning to believe that the very form of a video game influences people. It's a conceptual shift along the lines of Ong, when you see that you can manipulate the content on the teevee.

Today Jane and Ryan and I drive down to Los Angeles for E3, a big video game trade show, to further explore these issues.

Stopping Travel? Never.

A travel writer publishes his farewell column, from Romanesko. As Gerry Volgenau points out here, you never stop observing and commenting, you just stop publishing in certain venues.

Spam Signifyer

My email has stopped working. How do I know? I'm not receiving spam.

Frog Tongue

I only went to an acupuncturist once. He stuck needles in my arms and wrists when I was having painful repetative stress injury from overvociferous web publishing. And he looked at my tongue. Turns out the color and texture of your tongue can signify your state of health.

So just imagine my shock when I looked in the rear view window on Monday and saw that my tongue was bumpy and green! "Ew! Frog tongue!" Jane cried out from the passenger seat.

That was the same day that I woke up with a itchy feeling in my throat and the beginning leakings of a head full of fluid. It was the start of a cold alright; now full blown into achy dribbling distracted staring at the sunshine outside feeling cold inside but all jammied up in my red secondskin and wondering.

Since then I've been laying low, sleeping more than eight hours a night, drinking Traditional Medicinals (care for a free sample?). Usually in a situation like this I make chicken soup. Instead we visited the Vietnamese noodle place down the street that has been taunting us with its signs since February, only opening this weekend. Heaping bowls of salty meat-broth and rice noodles for two: 12$.

Illness has me moany and kinda useless. I'm not too quick on the uptake; instead of writing, I spent today formatting and reinstalling software on Jane's computer. Ritual purging - cleanse the system, cleanse the body.

I'm hoping to squelch most of this illness in time for travel. Finally after almost two straight weeks of being at home we're leaving Oakland for Los Angeles to attend E3 - a video game trade show where hundreds of prolific digital dream peddlers set up a fantastic spectacle of sales and speculation. I'm moderating a panel on game markets in Asia, Thursday morning May 15 at 9am.

Welcome I-Home

Surfing the world wide web a few weeks back for our piece on mobile smut, Jane discovered some personal home pages built for i-mode mobile phones in Japan. We did a little bit of digging, and talking, and yesterday this piece was published: Welcome i-Home: Personal Pages on Japan's Mobile Internet - like the piece on MoBloggin', this is further exploration of personal media creation using mobile devices.

Extratextual Context

Aside from BoingBoing, the New York Times, and Slashdot, I haven't been doing much reading lately. Yesterday I spent the first half of the day writing and editing, and the second two thirds of the day playing a game and taking notes. I've moved pretty far away from books. The last text I finished was Fast Food Nation which I read swiftly, because it was contemporary, journalistic non-fiction. It resembled much of what I was reading online; opinionated reportage on the consumption of popular culture.

For the last four weeks I have had another book at my side: Orality and Literacy, by Walter J. Ong. I have a tremendous amount of respect for this text. He studies the effect of writing on human consciousness; how literate societies differ from primarily oral societies; how text has made us think different. I originally read parts of this book in a Ken Gergen class in college. At that time I wondered if the easy textual fluidity encouraged by the internet might cause the development of variant grapholects - that is to say, if we might see that our written consciousness has been made more oral by immediate textual exchange technologies. (Second Orality).

Now I'm reading Ong again, watching to see how he describes and establishes evidence for the character of this oral-to-literate transformation, and wondering where video games fit in with this idea of media technology architecting thought.

Reading the book does take some brain adjustment. The text is dense; I read about half of the paragraphs twice. Some I had to read out loud. Maybe I am already post-literate. Maybe I'm just a busybrain. Anyhow, I'm easily compelled to keep going, because he says things like this:

oral recollection

But even with a listener to stimulate and ground your thought, the bits and pieces of your thoughts cannot be preserved in jotted notes. How could you ever call back to mind what you had so laboriously worked out? The only answer is: Think memorable thoughts. In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retriveving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thought must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions, in standard thematic settings..., in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterened for retention and ready recall, or in other mnemonic form. Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems. (p 34).

text maps to the body

Texts in various scripts around the world are read variously from right to left, or left to right, or top to bottom, or all these ways at once as in boustrophedon writing, but never anywhere, so far as is known, from bottom to top. Texts assimilate utterance to the human body. They introduce a feeling for 'headings' in accumulations of knowledge: 'chapter' derives from the Latin caput meaning head (as of the human body). Page have not only 'heads' but also 'feet,' for footnotes. (p 99)

Text as memory bank, mapped on to the body. In the West, literacy borrowed heavily from rhetoric; oral-delivery held aloft as the paragon of thinking presentation. It was women writers, trained outside of the all boy's club of education for public speaking, who gave us the novel form, when the dialog of text shifts away from the exterior events of men killing armies with jawbones, and towards the interior life of people thinking about the sorts of things you're free to think about when you can order your thoughts as you inscribe them.

Extratextual Context

Extratextual context is missing not only for the readers but also for the writer. Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. "The writer's audience is always a fiction" (Ong 1977). The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves. Even in writing to a close friend I have to fictionalize a mood for him, to which he is expected to conform. The reader must also fictionalize the writer. When my friend reads my letter, I may be in an entirely different frame of mind from when I wrote it. Indeed, I may very well be dead. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive. Most books extant today were written by persons now dead. Spoken utterance comes only from the living. (p 101)

He has a remarkable way of looking at textuality and literacy from the outside, as much as you can while being steeped in it, and employing it for communication. This is some of the best reading I've done for my life's work of human communication. I look forward to the last sixty pages! If I can turn my attention away from multiplayer online games.

- A Review of Orality and Literacy by Art Bingham.
- An online reprint of Chapter 4: Writing Restructures Consciousness
- Check out this book on Amazon: with reviews or the version I read.

(Thanks to EthanB for the Ong picture link)

Red Meat Storage Stew

A chill has set in on the Bay Area. And Jane and I have thirty-six hours straight to be home. So I spent Saturday afternoon, between bouts of EverBlue 2, cooking up some Red Meat Storage Stew. Storage, because I made enough of it to feed us far in the future.

Stew Storage

Back-Due Bandwidth Bills

Since 1994, Links.net been hosted by friends, geeks, in San Francisco. Most of that time it has been more or less gratis; I was piggybacking on the large virtual real estate set up for the brave shared future of publishing.

Parts of that future came true - a million personal projects have bloomed. But other parts of that future haven't come to pass - the revenue streams from our web dreams are in arrears.

One hard-up friend today apologetically handed me a back-due bill for web hosting for nine months at $75 a month - $675 (I use a lot of bandwidth, and a lot of space). Do you get enough pleasure out of reading this web site to give a cash donation towards that amount? PayPal takes a 5% cut, Amazon takes a 15% cut.