Crime and Punishment.

More than a Private Joke: Cross-Media Parody in Roleplaying Games

This class has, by necessity, only viewed a small smattering of the genres that make up the media landscape. If we had, somehow, an additional week, few things would be more appropriate to add than tabletop roleplaying. I found More than a Private Joke especially interesting because my friends and I played an intensely media-aware roleplaying game only yesterday evening.

“Roleplaying games are advocated by players, game designers, and academics as “active” entertainment, as opposed to the “passive” consumption of stories…. On the contrary, roleplaying performance is heavily influenced by other media.” Indeed; while I myself have said that roleplay is fundamentally creative, in practice that creativity is finding a way to bring together the elements and tropes we find most interesting in our observed media.

The idea of the character archetype is deeply key to roleplaying games. The most successful ones are those that are built on a foundation of character classes with strengths and weaknesses already known, and voices and mindsets already well-understood to provide a background. It takes a skilled author to produce from whole cloth, what a literary observer would call a rounded character, rich in history and pathos. Anyone can pick up the role of a stereotypical gruff dwarven fighter named Gimloy Stronginthearm, and over hours and days of playing that role, develop the foibles and personality of a more nuanced character.

Tosca’s experience in What a Wonderful War shows the way that people share political and moral conversations in the outward levity and (some would say) triviality of tabletop games. A criticism of the paper here would be that no sooner is the satirical angle introduced, than the author moves on to the equally important, yet distinct, matter of parody. On the other hand, the distinction drawn here presented well; parody, the ironic observation of fiction, is different from satire, the ironic tweaking of social norms.

That parodic, satirical roleplaying games are so fundamentally connected to the works they chastise actually serves to enshrine the elder works, as Tosca notes. One cannot enjoy Space Balls without knowing Star Wars. Nor will you understand the mentioned joke about the troublesome software company MacroHard if you don’t know about Microsoft.

But all this discussion, so far, has focused on the authorial structuring of a setting, which is a major portion of roleplaying games, but not everything! The players are, through their player-character avatars, the stars of the show. And as Tosca reports, the average session is rife with players spouting off direct allusions and quotation, jokes, and commentary. Tosca quotes Mackay as saying that these interludes are digressions from actual gameplay, and that is, in my experience, true, insomuch as where the player might say “I ask the knight if he really says ‘Ni’ all the time,” it’s understood that the player’s character does not actually do so. My group often refers to this kind of chatter as a Greek chorus, or less favorably, as the peanut gallery.

A second category of commentary, one that Tosca considers a shade of the previous one, consists of the allusions and discussion within the context of the narrative — in other words, things that the characters actually do. The statement “The only good Fulzan is a dead Fulzan,” from Tosca’s foray, is not unlike the references from games I have personally experienced.

If one wishes to dig into tabletop roleplaying in order to discover some redeeming value, perhaps the fact that it develops the mental muscle of quick wit and satire (among other things) is useful, but I would hope that in the liberal arts, at least, we can put crass materialism aside and take in the richness of experience and dialog for its own sake. Tosca provides a strong, ringing endorsement of roleplaying as valuable, one that reaffirms my own feelings and, I hope, can encourage others to pick up the medium.

*As a closing note, I’m afraid that the title is rather too much of an in-joke to make much sense at this point. Let it be sufficient to say that in the game my friends and I play, there is a great deal of crime, and even more puns.

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The Hitchhiker — A short story

I will present the following story with minimal foreword. It is intended, as a great writer once said, as a potent, all-purpose allegory, or alternatively as my personal religious experience. It’s going into Toyone next semester. Copyrights, trademarks, ethical and moral obligations and so on are all mine.

Hitchhiker

First off, I should say it’s been years now, so I may have forgotten some of the details. I do recall I’d been driving north to see the Aurora Borealis… and to get out of my head. I was driving my Fiberfab Valkarie. She’s a classic sports car, but I’d managed to get her from an estate sale as a kit for only $2000. It took two years to put that car together… in fact, I think she’s why I went through geography twice.

Somewhere in Alaska, maybe a week out from Anchorage, I saw this guy by the roadside, casting a long shadow from the low sun. He was an old man, orange shot through his gray beard, thumbing his way along the road, in a really beat up leather jacket. Well, I’ve hitched before, so I pulled over. The old guy asked if I was going to Anchorage, and I said yeah, and he climbed in, and we took off.

I asked the old man what his name was. He smiled and said that I could call him Thursday. Now, obviously, that’s alarming. Decent people don’t go around with pseudonyms. But, by that point he was already in the car. You can’t push him out then; that could make him violent. So I just smiled and nodded, and he shifted his bulky jacket and leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes.

And we drove on in my Valk through the gathering twilight.

Soon, the only sign of daylight was a faint glow on the horizon. I pulled into a gas station, and as I parked, Thursday looked up with a start. I should explain that a Valkarie doesn’t normally have cupholders- she’s no minivan- but I had added a couple to mine for convenience’s sake. I wanted to be clear about that right now, because this one time I was telling a dude about what happened and he didn’t believe me because I mentioned the cupholders and, well, he thought I was making the whole thing up.

My point was, just when I pulled into the station, Thursday woke up and grunted something like “yeah, let me help pay for gas, man,” and he threw a single penny into the cupholder. Now, I looked down into the cupholder, and then I look up at him, but he just looks me right back in the eye and we’re sitting there for a good ten seconds, the engine ticking and cooling, before I give in, grab the penny, and climb out.

I walked up to the station and counted out my cash- $40 plus one bent 1982 penny- and just before I stepped in, I heard a commotion. I looked through the automatic doors, and this fat guy barged out to the doorway, bounced off the doors once, waited for the doors to open, then marched off, the whole while bellowing at the top of his lungs. I don’t recall his exact words, but the gist of it was his wife, who worked at the counter, was insufficiently understanding of his sleeping with her sister, and that he had half a mind to fire her or divorce her, and he was not sure which. He jumped in his big truck and roared out of there, nearly even hit my poor Valk.

I slipped through the automatic door and she was still there, mascara streaming down and everything, but standing behind the counter all the same. Naturally, I’m a bit sheepish, but hey, gotta get gas somewhere, right? I took out my cash and she looked out at the pump and said “Why thank you sir,” real professional, but as she goes on she gets louder and louder, “but there’s no need for that, now IS THERE, seeing how we are VERY HAPPY to provide you a FULL TANK OF GAS ON THE HOUSE! YES! WE’LL JUST LET THAT FAT BASTARD PAY!” She jabbed at the register ferociously, and I thanked her and practically ran out to the car to gas up.

We hit the road again, Thursday and the Valk and I, as the sun was already sinking below the treetops. I looked over at Thursday and saw him nursing a cup of coffee. “Where did you get that,” I asked, and he looked ruefully up at me. “I came in right behind you. Looked like she wouldn’t have minded…. I got you one,” and sure enough, he put a second cup in the cupholder.

Let me tell you, I was glad to see that. So I took a sip, expecting the nectar of the gods, and what I got is the most oversweetened coffee I have ever tasted. “What did you do to this,” I asked, and he just said “It’s honey, it’s good for you.”

Well, I just drank it, because when you’re driving cross-country for the tenth straight hour that day, you take what caffeine you can get. It went slowly, and by the end there was just this honey-coffee sludge at the bottom of the cup. I put the cup down, but Thursday looked at me, and I realized just how deep his eyes sunk into his head, how heavy his face looked, how every orange and white whisker drooped down, and I realize that he’s gone through all the trouble to get this coffee, and clearly, he’d done everything he could to help me…

Actually, rationally, no, I mean, he’d have to have more than one cent on him. Rationally, that money had nothing to do with the free gas. Rationally, he just stole some coffee- and far, far too much honey.

I grit my teeth and swilled down the dregs.

Thursday nodded, just once. I was lucky to catch it out of the corner of my eye, against the dark, snow-spattered roadside. The only light in the car was the reflection of the headlights off the snowy road ahead. He leaned forward, just slightly, and the corners of his mouth turned just ever-so-slightly up. “Not far, now,” he rumbled.

We drove on for two solid hours- I know, because I kept checking the clock as I waited for him to tell me where to drop him. Long after I’d decided he’d been thinking of something else, I heard him gasp. I looked over, and he was leaning forward all the way, looking straight up. I checked the mirror and, since we were on a straightaway and there’s nobody in sight, I leeeeaned forward and looked up, and there it is, right above us, rippling like the curtains of God’s own burlesque show, green and purple and red, the Aurora. “Stop the car,” he said, hoarsely, then louder, throaty, “STOP! We’re here!”

That was the loudest thing he’d said so far. The whole car rattled like I’d got bass strapped right to the suspension. I pulled over and Thursday growled with laughter. The Aurora was growing brighter and brighter; already you could see the ice, the snow, the black wells below the trees, yet it was not so bright as to wash out the stars. Imagine the brightest full moon you’ve ever seen- by the time I climbed out of the car, it’s was that bright twice over, and all shades from cerise to aquamarine, from maroon to neon ivy. Thursday rolled out of the car and unfolded- it was a bit cramped in the Valkarie, but somehow I never realized how tall the man was. His bulky leather jacket hid more muscle than I had imagined, and somehow his stoop concealed more than six feet of towering Norseman.

Finally, Thursday turned to me, the Aurora in his eyes. “I am almost home. Come with me just a little farther.”

Now, we’re talking about the middle of nowhere. I know for a fact there’s no houses around that stretch of desolate Alaskan highway… but, somehow, I was standing in the snow above the arctic circle in little more than jeans and an old sweat-shirt but I’m not cold- I’m warm, as though a little stale coffee and a lot of honey are burning like magma, some internal heat. I would never follow a crazy hobo alone into a wild Alaskan night, but even then I knew that there was something more to Thursday, and I needed to know what it was. And so, I walked with him away from the road, through the margin of snow-covered pines, deep into the still-black shadows below a growing nova in the sky above.

You aren’t going to believe what happened next, any more than some people are willing to believe that my Valk has cupholders, but I’m going to tell you anyway. I’m going to tell you what I know happened, and you can decide if I was dreaming or I was high or if some hobo put something in my coffee. I don’t think any of those are true, but you can decide that for yourself.

So we pushed through black pines, and soon it was so thick I could hardly keep up with Thursday. Every time I saw him, each time in a different hue, he seemed somehow larger. His coat grew coarser, his hair longer and redder. Finally, I stepped into a clearing a few paces behind him, and I saw…

I saw the Aurora, shimmering, rippling, soaring from horizon to horizon like no earthly sight I have seen before or since. I see Thursday, now nearly a giant, holding a hammer made of silver and gold, wearing pelts matted with ancient blood. I saw him standing on a precipice towering over a vast range of forested mountains at once black with shadow, white with ice, and shimmering in all colors below the Aurora. He turned to me and spoke in a murmur which boomed off distant mountainside.

“Now is the time for my third and final gift. The Coin of Wealth and the Mead of Health are obvious, garish. This last one will be more subtle, and yet more powerful. Take this, my hammer, and keep it in your heart, and all that you shall seek, that you seek with all your heart, will come to you.” Thor extended the short-handled hammer before him, and I took it in both arms. With little ceremony, he stepped back from me, stood, and in an instant, a bolt of lightning from clear black and sparkling sky struck the ground at his feet, and he was gone.

I woke up the next morning, in the Valk, the only signs that a man named Thursday had ever been there were a bent 1982 penny, an empty paper coffee cup, and a worn old carpenter’s hammer sitting in the passenger’s seat. I fired up the car and turned around. I hadn’t made it to Anchorage, but there were things I had to do.

Hoo boy, I’ve been waiting for this all semester!

Alright! Let’s talk about self-assembling narrative structure and classic experience-based-play through the — wait, what’s all this about military FPSes and children?

Oh.

Look, before we talk about computer games influencing children, we need to talk about an even more important issue that we’ve been ignoring for far longer than games: violence in stage plays. What is a child supposed to think when presented with a realistic portrayal of murder, poisoning, even suicide, played out in full 3D before a packed audience? Doesn’t MacBeth desensitize children to the very height of political violence? And it’s not just the older works: Equus is merely 43 years old, and exposes children to all manner of depravity.

Furthermore, the existence of Punch-and-Judy shows prove that plays are universally A, poorly written; and B, targeted at children. How have the millennials, gen Y, generation X, the baby boomers, the silent generation, the greatest generation, the centennials, the children of the civil war, the Mexican-American war generation, and several dozen other generations all managed to survive in this deadly and ethically vacuous environment?

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Yes, violent video games exist. Yes, some games are aimed at children. Yes, children exposed to violent games will both be desensitized to violence and will see violence an incrementally more legitimate way to resolve disputes. All of those statements are dully backed by studies. But by god, if a child plays a violent video game, it’s not the fault of the video game existing, but the fault of the parent who buys a game called Grand Theft Auto and is shocked, shocked I say, to see that it portrays people stealing cars.

Child gamers today have a rich and segregated library of games available to them. First and foremost among these games is undoubtedly Minecraft, where the most violent thing you can do is use a blocky foam sword to knock over cardboard boxes with zombies drawn on them. The majority of the game, in abstract description, consists of farm chores like collecting eggs, planting wheat, collecting pork (bloodlessly, as in “push a cow over and it turns into steaks in a cloud of magic dust), and, above all, mining and building things.

Conflict certainly exists in this setting, but in an arcadey, restricted fashion: when darkness falls each night (a 7-minute period of darkness between 10-minute days), an assortment of traditional monsters (skeletons, zombies, and spiders, plus stranger beasts like a shrublike explosive quadruped called a Creeper, and a tall, mostly harmless entity called Endermen) appear and menace the player’s character. Though threatening, these are not thinking or moral creatures, but instead another force of nature to be overcome. Violence against them is no more desensitizing than Bugs Bunny thwacking Elmer Fudd with a mallet.

Most remarkably, players are merely given a blank canvas and a system of rules; their characters appear in a lush wilderness of blocky terrain, and carve it to suit their needs. Where else can an eight-year old have such executive control of the design of a home as when they build it block-by-block? Where can they learn so easily the simple power of turning the raw stuff of nature into tools, shelter, and food? Plenty of ways, surely. But where can they do all these things, and do so willingly, with their friends?

Minecraft is something of a phenomenon, and for good reason. It’s probably more influential to this upcoming generation than Star Wars was to its. But while it is an epochal game, there are other games that are both nonviolent and meant for a young audience. In fact, I would venture to wager that computer game companies do not, in fact, consist of giggling psychopaths bent on corrupting young minds. Some do consist of giggling psychopaths, of course, but those teams don’t care about young minds one way or the other.

So, can we please, please dispense with the old conversation about video games and the ghosts crowding young children’s fragile, eggshell minds? There’s a lot of discussion we can have about this stuff as art. I don’t argue with the facts that have been uncovered by video game violence studies, nor with the conclusion that violent games must be restricted from children. Rather, I argue that these conclusions are obvious and the premise (that all games, even the most violent, are for children) inane.

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Dwarf Fortress is enshrined in San Francisco’s MoMA as video game art. It is quite possibly one of the most influential computer games of all time (popular among game developers, for one), and in design it is rightfully hailed as exquisitely detailed in its simulation of mind, body, and the virtual world of its denizens. The game, upon starting up, creates a random world with a creation myth and tectonic history. Civilizations of humans, elves, and the titular dwarves emerge and evolve over centuries of history, simulating the lives of tens thousands of individuals and dozens of kingdoms. Even genetics is simulated, and a line of kings ten generations long may be known for a beaky nose or a proclivity to oversharing. Before the player even takes direct control, a sword may exist (having not been dictated beforehand by any designer) that is made of bronze, decorated with emeralds, and bearing an engraving detailing the ascension of a king four hundred years earlier. Many computers simply aren’t powerful enough to run this game sufficiently. This is a screenshot of that superlatively detailed and sophisticated game:

It is also free, and the work of two brothers who live entirely off of donations from eager fans.

The picture shows, from left to right, undiscovered terrain (the black area speckled with punctuation), a river channel cut through marble (the blue and white tildes are water, the green asterisks a cluster of zircon crystals, and faint grey £s are probably galena, an ore of lead and silver. The brown rectangular areas are places where the dwarves are designated to dig a passage, and the green areas are the grassy slope of the mountain side. Somewhere near the center is a smiling dwarf, whom is currently thinking about his favorite musical instrument (a fanciful, randomly generated form of bell) as he works. The teal area on the right is wide open sky, a place where the land has sloped away into invisibility.

Now we zoom into the mindset of that dwarf, to see what he’s thinking….

Each and every character has as much detail, making a kind of soup of personalities. In Dwarf Fortress, you don’t follow a story. You watch a story emerge from the raw history as your colony of dwarves starts with nothing and eventually achieves greatness or, more likely, falls to one of any number of catastrophes.

Dwarf Fortress provides an environment for expression and storytelling that almost makes it a medium itself. When a player discovers a historical narrative that moves them, it’s partially the thrill of discovering something no-one else has witnessed that makes  it so fascinating. It’s not a story, but a story generator — changing the role of the consumer and the producer in popular art. Who knows where that will lead?

Student Assigned Writing Project About Satire: Writes Title as Headline.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

A Blog, The Internet July 5th, 2016 — A student, given an assignment relating to fake news broadcasting, wrote the title of his blog as though it were a newspaper headline, sources reported Tuesday afternoon. Indications suggest that the student, as yet unidentified, went on to continue the allegedly humorous affectation into the opening paragraphs of the blog entry. One highly-placed source forecast the temporary stylistic change to end approximately now.*

I am somewhat familiar with satirical newspapers. I’ve read the Onion for nearly ten years now, and sometimes, sometimes I wonder if they are really satirical, or just time-travelers with a sick sense of humor. From the ancient archives of the Onion descends the Daily Show, and from that the Colbert Report. Now, what is the social role of Colbert report? His “research” and statements are not rigorous, but that does not change their import. Nor does the triviality of The Onion make it irrelevant. No, if news media is the “first, rough draft of history,” then satire is the crayon scrawlings of young historians.

Satire is that bright, playful lens that illuminates the field of news media, that introduces people to the running discourse of society. A 12-year-old will not actually care about or understand the electoral system of Florida. But at 12 years old, I certainly knew that John Stewart thought that the election was a mess. There’s little that motivates learning more than not getting a joke, and I tried to understand the issue. Now, after studying politics for more than a decade, I finally figured out 20% of what happened in the 2000 election.

That’s not to say that satire news is only for children — on the contrary, the onslaught of news we receive every day, the number of political issues that must be understood and a personal opinion prepared overwhelms even the most politically astute viewer/citizen. Satire breaks it down into digestible bites.

That is why satirical news takes such a political edge, I think. It is also a major flaw with satire news as a primary news source, because any abbreviation of the political situation will slant it, colorize the news to a particular viewpoint. Entertainment news that masks itself as real news misinforms the viewer, acclimatizes them to exaggeration and falsehood. This is the fundamental problem with Fox News and MSNBC, where parodic exaggeration of real political viewpoints are presented as fact. Fortunately, they are so absurd that noone would really think that they are people’s real viewpoints.

A point on specifics from the reading:

“he writers work throughout the morning on deadline pieces spawned by breaking news, as well as longer-term projects, trying to find, as Josh Lieb, a co-executive producer of the show, put it, stories that “make us angry in a whole new way.” By lunchtime, Mr. Stewart (who functions as the show’s managing editor and says he thinks of hosting as almost an afterthought) has begun reviewing headline jokes. By 3 p.m. a script is in; at 4:15, Mr. Stewart and the crew rehearse that script, along with assembled graphics, sound bites and montages. There is an hour or so for rewrites — which can be intense, newspaper-deadlinelike affairs — before a 6 o’clock taping with a live studio audience.”

The intense production schedule boggles the mind.

As we go to press, it seems that the writing assignment was once again back in form as a press release, possibly in reference to the Onion’s all-but-trademarked method detailed below:

A featured story begins with a punch line, which is shown in the headline of the article: “Future U.S. History Students: ‘It’s Pretty Embarrassing How Long You Guys Took to Legalize Gay Marriage’” “Chicago Cubs Can’t Believe They’re Doing This Again” “Nations Shudder At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text” “Drugs Win Drug War”.  The article then serves to back up this big joke by embedding much smaller jokes into the text.

Good night America, and good luck.

Battle stations!

This isn’t an assignment.

I just read Redshirts, and it’s fantastic. Why am I saying that here?

Well, if I were to say it’s a self-aware text… that would be very true. More true than most texts.

Seriously. Go read it.

Pity, Pity!

In this commentary on ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, I intend to talk about talking about a given media, finally earning the title Metadialogblog. Before moving on to the criti-criticism, something must be said, and I acknowledge that some people will be offended. If you have a weak heart, please stop reading now.

That said: Firefly was not perfect.

I’m sorry.

For this reason, this little essay is not a defense of Firefly, or even really about Firefly per se, but entirely about Pity and its arguments.

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There is a chastising tone to Pity which seems out of place in a scholarly work. Amy-Chinn herself clarifies that, as Whedon is a progressive writing icon, he can and must be “held to a higher standard” than others, and that it is disappointing that he has failed to match the high expectations placed on him. It is entirely possible to criticize a work – even to declare it deeply flawed – without convicting it of being a failure. And for lacking that clinical tone, Pity is A FAILURE!

I kid. The antagonizing tone does not retract from the sound criticisms of Pity. It does, however, tend to make the reader less likely to read the work as a scholarly piece and more likely to read it as a personal opinion.

Amy-Chinn has certainly done her research, and explains that she’s dug into every available resource to uncover history of the work and the intentions of the author. As such, it’s surprising that she hasn’t considered the seriously limited nature of the text itself. Firefly is, in essence, the first few chapters of a long novel, not unlike a fragmentary manuscript. It is true that we possess a vast store of associated media, commentary, and cut scenes, but these are not necessarily representative of what is or would be part of the Firefly mythos. The vicissitudes of the creative process could change these ideas entirely.

Page 177 is an outstanding example of the fantastic results of the literary reading of modern media. Finally, science fiction can be examined as part of real, grown-up culture and not as, at best, real literature with a science fiction veneer, or as violent technological wish fulfillment with NAZI allusions. (If you are looking for violent technological wish fulfillment with NAZI allusions, I recommend The Iron Dream, which takes the idea to its logical conclusion.)

Amy-Chinn makes a critical logical flaw in presuming that the lack of certain scenes is a conclusive statement about the character, or that the only consideration in including or failing to include a scene is that scene’s statement about sex politics. Could a writer, in 2002, expect to get away with two prostitution scenes in one season? Would audiences suspend their disbelief enough to accept that Inara’s clients are frequently plot-relevant spouts of information? Given these limitations, would the wise writer (and editor, staff, producer, executive producer, etc.,) choose to focus on the average john and not a jane? And finally, is the choice to emphasize female homosexuality as normal over showcasing a fairly accepted relationship intrinsically objectionable?

Pity‘s real body of work begins in earnest when discussing the nature of prostitution from a feminist perspective. It’s a rich, forceful writing that clearly frames the foundational discourse of the paper.

The bizarre side-step into paranoid-homophobic conspiracy theories that allege that women and gay men seek to overthrow hetronormativity is concerning. None of the women (or gay men) that I know have such lofty goals. Nor does the argument that legal prostitution, with attendant medical observations, hold much weight as a gender-based issue. A male prostitute would be required to have the same sorts of examinations as a female one for the same reason that firefighters of both genders are required to wear a fireproof jacket and helmet…. Not to express some latent desire to burden people with rubberized cloth, but rather because otherwise it’s a highly risky profession!

Unlike the well-built and established work on feminism in the earlier parts of the essay, the sections on race are brief, weak. Something of a fishing trip for outrage. An interracial couple that emphasizes monogamy and acceptance is somehow construed as the white man once again breaking the black woman’s spirit as though she were a wild mare. There certainly are racist elements to Firefly (for a universe that’s half Asian, all the main characters are of old world extraction), but here they are neither explored in detail nor connected to the rest of the text.

The point of stories is not to portray an ideal world wherein characters are always afforded the respect they deserve. Nor is it to provide escapism for a specific group. Rather, it is what it is. People make it because it’s fun to do so, they view it because it’s fun to do so. Along the way, moral and ethical values are shared – and observing texts is an excellent way to study those values. But there is no obligation, aside from the obligation of the author to represent their own vision.

The Long, Dark Prime-Time of the Soul.*

The dark age of cable is coming to an end. Cable television is fundamentally oppositional to capitalism, and has resulted in the widespread decay of television quality.

Oh, sure. Now I sound like Hirsch decrying the end of civilization, but where Hirsh assumed that there was an objective “good culture,” I base my argument on an economic measure. Producing culturally valued texts is valued and difficult to achieve by definition (we know they are difficult because they are outliers in popularity and/or influentiality, and thus only a small portion can be outliers). As it is difficult, producing these works requires more investment, and as they are valued, there is an economic incentive to produce culturally valued works.

The bundled nature of cable television eliminates that economic incentive. Why invest the effort to create a work that will be valued if its existence will have no increase in membership, and therefore profit? The economically driven channel executive will maintain only the cheapest material needed to maintain its purview and then simply skate by. Thus, the explosion of cheap-to-produce themed reality shows.

Few things are more likely to revitalize the industry than a profusion of independent streaming services. Many new theories of design, new approaches, diverse artists, and above all, a way for consumers to signal to the manufacturers what they need. The death of the cable giants will be long and painful, and those who have had to rely on cable internet will agree that it will be well-deserved.

But now, let us move on to the real topic of discussion today: television viewing habits. I have binged on TV shows probably about a dozen times in my life, all but two of those times using DVDs and the exceptions being a two occasions on which I watched Archer seasons one and two. A decent show, admittedly. I primarily watched Archer because my friends all but forced me to — in other words, I had lowered cultural capital due to lacking familiarity with the show. That is separate from the practical concerns that lead to me watching two or three straight hours of the show at a time — namely, the 20-minute run-time and the fact that it was available in highly compressible video files from my friends.

Perhaps I don’t watch TV that much. And yet, the third consecutive episode of Deep Space Nine is playing on television in the other room even as I write. Two hours of consecutive show time out of 65.8 total hours of Star Trek (hopefully more soon!).

The interesting thing is the lingering disdain for binge watching. After all, non-binge watching might entail two or three hours of varying TV shows. While stigmatized, binge watching is somehow a distinct, marginally worse vice. Why?

I think it is the ease of calculation. Watching four episodes of the same show, sans commercials, makes it easy to stand up and stretch afterwards and say, “dear god, that’s two hours that are permanently gone from my life!” Of course, the same two hours go away if you’re watching anything else for that time, but it’s more difficult to find the sum when using multiple subsections. If the thought is depressing, I myself like to remember that while the sand flows, in the hourglass of life, the least entertaining thing to do is just watch it pile up.

*Title care of the sequel to the single best detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic ever written.

This American Pun on “This American Life”

Act One

Ira Glass, eternal fixture of American radio, has shared with us a snapshot of Radio in America. The Legend of Funky One’s itinerant radio station, told autobiographically by Iggy Scam, portrays radio as a deeply urban phenomenon. Scam obsesses with the urban decay of Miami’s north side, almost lovingly. It’s a warren, a smoky catacomb where the nominally technological takes on an illicit, mystical feeling. Likewise, the city is both a community and an anonymizing agent, not unlike the close yet one-directional connection Radio inspires.

All this is in great contrast to the highly rural feeling of Jack Hitt’s discovery of the esoteric stardom of Mike and Gordon, readers to the blind. With that peculiar northeastern enunciation and muffled audio, it’s not just their broadcasting style that seems pulled from the 1940s. They are similar to Funky One in that:

1.) They have cobbled-together equipment and nearly no legitimacy.

2.) They are extremely local and thrive on their locality.

Radio is fundamentally a local phenomenon. Unlike television, internet, even printed media, Radio can easily reach everyone in a given area with few barriers to entry, but can only reach those people in that given area, simply due to the electromagnetic properties of radio waves themselves. Like all media, the function and the form are interlinked, and radio’s function forces it, and enables it, to accentuate the local, even more so when constrained to the resources of a local community college or pirate radio equipment.

Ross on Radio sums it up well here:

Listening to the Point is both great radio and the kind of radio that you hope to never hear. I have no voyeuristic interest in the devastation-there’s plenty of that on TV. It’s more that the station is conveying an ineffable “sense of place” at the moment, and doing so in the context of a music format.

It is this sense of place that the mechanistic and frankly vapid lowest-common-denominator radio of V103 cannot produce. They can certainly speak of local places, they can refer to local trends, but the limitations of phone banks and statistics — especially when applying nationwide trends to local radio — wash out the local color.

Act Two

Ah, the personal radio story. In my experience, there are four radio channels:

• Clinically insane demagogues, plus local news.
• Spanish music.
• 20 consecutive minutes of ads, 4 minutes of the channel theme, 1 minute of obnoxious DJ prattle, 2 minute-and-a-half-long songs, then repeat.
• NPR

One out of four ain’t bad. In fact, I’m thinking of learning Spanish, because the music itself isn’t that bad.

Act Three

All that sounds so negative, though, doesn’t it?

Well, there is a future for broadcast music, and there’s a future for local and hyperlocal news. These are different futures.

Broadcast music is growing into distributed music sharing. Downloaded or streamed, music that people actually listen to (as opposed to background music in stores) is overwhelmingly distributed over the internet, and usually at least in part selected by the listener and their friends.

In contrast, hyperlocal news is emerging through services such as reddit and other news aggregators. For instance, http://www.reddit.com/r/humboldt has local information about, well, Humboldt. Communities like this allow the radio’s locality to work with internet ubiquity.

I Apologize Profusely for the Picture

Now that that’s out of the way….

Selecting a single favorite song is a serious conundrum. One’s enjoyment of music is tied to circumstance and mood, and what is currently favorite could tomorrow be hated.

Let’s see… thing’s I’ve considered:

• Life’ll Kill Ya (Warren Zevon)
• My Shit’s Fucked Up (Warren Zevon)
• Diamonds On My Windshield (Tom Waits)
• Babel (Mumford and Sons)
• Tuesday’s Dead (Cat Stevens)
• Call Me a Hole (Constructed by PomDeterrific, using parts salvaged from Call Me Maybe (Carly Rae Jepsen) and Head Like a Hole (Nine Inch Nails))
• Move Over (Steppenwolf)
• Space Oddity (David Bowie, cover by Space Commander Chris Hadfield)
• Of the Night (Bastille)
• Take My Heart to the Fire (Assembed by Kill_mR_DJ, from a large collection of songs)
• Black Wings (Tom Waits)
• Red Right Hand (Nick Cave)
• What’s Left of the Flag (Flogging Molly)
• The Pope Song (Tim Minchin)*
• Stop Rainin’ Lord (Warren Zevon)
• Needing/Getting (OK Go)
• Oh You Pretty Things (David Bowie)
• Somebody to Love (Queen)
• Birdhouse in Your Soul (They Might be Giants)

And, bonus, listing these songs like this means I get social credit for referencing them if you, specific current reader, happen to know them! Yes; like you, I have good taste.

After much soul-searching, I settled on This Tune (The name is literally “This Tune,”) by the ineffable colins, also known as Nivi. That it is unlikely anyone else will study this song is not irrelevant to my selecting This Tune.

This Tune is unusual in that the linked completed performance consists of a score written by colins to fit lyrics supplied by an anonymous fan. Perhaps you think I am obliquely referring to myself; rest assured that I am nowhere near humble enough to do something like that. The lyrics are:

this is how it starts
(break into component parts)
these lines, these angles our/are story arcs
(they intersect in city parks)
and all along the walks of life
when it’s your friend who holds the knife
and bares his teeth so gentle white
and tears into your heart (goodnight)

but on and on this story goes
a course it follows no-one knows
silent, creeping, only grows
through all the highs and lows
until when we begin to see
how blind we are, how can it be
to take a leap and start alarms
to leave our jobs and take up arms

—-
CHORUS
our cities are destructing
as the creature is constructing
this distance spreads between us
and the lines begin to blur
our violence is erupting
but sometimes things corrupting
strangely are instructing
and can only be the cure
—-

so i stop to look around
(though battered, hungry, beaten down)
i gaze across this milling crowd
(i see these faces, staring proud)
grasping for that common thread
that binds this life, and to the dead
an ember burning, still aglow
it is a light that we all know

the furnace of the thoughts of men
(with these words we’re whole again)
a new beginning there is no end
(grab these shards and start to mend)
so comes the dawn, our cities burned
and we accept what we have learned
we all conform, all toe the line
and will until the end of time

—-
CHORUS
—-

—-
CHORUS
—-

So, is this song honest, independent and productive? Research is difficult with colons; I may have a slight advantage as I have submitted songs and chatted with Nivi on a few occasions, putting me ahead of most when it comes to studying the reclusive artist.

Honesty is hard to measure in any recent media since artists know they’re being watched constantly, and (aside from a few dramatic failures,) artists maintain a uniform public image in interviews, twitter, and publications. Further obscuring the issue is the complexity of modern performances; is the Colbert Report dishonest because Colbert portrays himself as having diametrically opposed views from those he actually holds? Or is it honest because the audience is “in on the joke” (for the most part)?

The unusual history of This Tune adds additional challenges. Nivi had no authorial initiative in the lyrics, and let’s not mince words here; while the score provides a substantial context for the interpretation of the poetic portion of the song, the lyrics provide the majority of those elements we examine for honesty, independence, and productivity. So we must look at the anonymous individual who wrote the lyrics. All we know is the name sundevil, which may in turn be a reference to Arizona State University, to a government project cracking down on hackers in the early ’90s, or a mild whirlwind. Certainly there are thousands of individuals with “sundevil” as a portion of their internet handle. Without pestering colins in person, it is impossible to dig further.

And yet, in the anonymity of the lyrics, we can be somewhat certain that the writer is expressing their own feelings — feelings that they felt needed to be protected with anonymity.

The productivity of This Tune depends highly on one’s feelings about human society. Such a metric is bound to be subjective. The revolutionary air of the song, the subtle hints of violence and Luddism, make for a still yet deep sensation. It’s a call to arms for pacifism, an anthem for antiestablishmentarianism. Lost, as it is, deep in the bowels of the internet, it is by no means a major driver of change, but popularity is not really a metric for productivity.

As for independence, it is harder to find something more independent than a song produced and distributed for free, unadvertised, and all but lost on the back pages of a little-known website.

*If you thought My Shit’s Fucked Up sounds offensive, I recommend avoiding this song. In it’s defense, it is relevant to the previous pope, not the current one.

Memetic Engineering

 

Memes are like genes, except mental. Ideas that are inhereted and which spread, and which make up the hidden pattern behind the behaviors we see… though not mentioned in these articles, memes are the content that flows in the mediums of pop culture. I’ll use the term here and there, so please keep in mind that these aren’t dat boi or whatever other inside joke is floating around on internet boards lately.

Magazines (and their successors, blogs, interest-based websites, and aggregators like Reddit) get a lot of credit (and blame) as definers of popular culture. Certainly, they are the mediums where people gain new interests and ideas spread rapidly between strangers. Unlike books’ years-long development cycles and newspaper’s (theoretical) focus on the facts, magazines allow new interests and approaches to reach a wide audience.

Yet I hesitate to say that magazines control, or even influence, the process of becoming pop culture. Why? Well, first off, recall the categories of pop culture from earlier — popular as in “a substantial portion of the population likes it,” popular in that “many people are influenced by it, even though the work itself isn’t well known,” and “it was made for mass consumption.” Call them phenomenal, influential, and mass market respectively. All advertising would fall into the third category, with the narrow exception of advertising for a limited audience, such as that done by hitmen.

For the first two categories (the popular and the influential works), magazines are, for the most part, going to focus on what’s already popular and influential in that realm of interest. They have to; people aren’t going to buy it if the magazine doesn’t cover at least some of the films and games and songs that they’re already interested in. Not everyone knows about, or likes, those works, and so it could be said that magazines provide what we could call cultural liquidity, encouraging trends to grow faster than they otherwise would by transplanting them to fresh soil throughout their market.

This is different from active manipulation, though, because it is fundamentally truthful. It simply says, “here’s something people like you like.”

But then…

That is a very powerful statement, implied in “these people are like you.” There’s certainly room to explore how, intentionally or unintentionally, people can create in-groups and develop an identity without ever directly dictating the structure of the group. But this extends far beyond magazines, and so, returning to that topic….

The intelligent consumer is capable of filtering out what it is they like. In this way, entertainment magazines are not unlike industry journals like EETIMES (electronic engineering) or pedagogical newsletters, in that they provide more information that rational consumers (in the economic sense) make use of. Fitting into the in-group identity is just another service being provided.

It all falls down with that third category, now, doesn’t it? Magazines can’t be expected to tell mass market content from the other two categories of pop culture. And worst of all, once it gets into the magazines, it’s now taking part in the cultural liquidity, gaining the other kinds of pop-culture status along the way. And while magazines as a genre are merely a medium, magazines as a business in practice know what they do and where they get money, encouraging them to thin the line between mass market media and the other kinds of pop culture. Thus originates an “ideal woman” who is unachievable, as certain highly legitimate news organizations have commented on. It’s not even just women, or just physical appearance, that are distorted in culture, nor is it a modern phenomenon. Don Quixote‘s titular character was so demented from reading fantastic fiction novels that he thought that they were true models of society.

In fine, these cultural aggregators, the providers of cultural liquidity, are not innately responsible for the memes they propagate. And yet, in practice, they have soft power to shift and pull. It’s hard to say how much power that is (after all, symmetry, smoothness, and some other traits are fairly universally attractive, and photoshop merely makes it easier to manipulate). A magazine certainly can’t dictate ideology to its audience, but it can, perhaps, emphasize or obscure a meme. Nonetheless, the basic networks still exist, the friend-to-friend sharing of ideas. Kicked out of the pool of cultural liquidity, it may grow more slowly, but a truly strong meme will still grow…