On 3D and its future February 16, 2012
Posted by temporalparadox in Rant, technology.Tags: 3dtv, dorky glasses, visual inputs
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I’ve been kicking around some thoughts about… well, a lot of things, really. Like anyone else, I have opinions I often feel like sharing, and I’ve got this platform for doing so sitting around getting dusty. The problem is that most of my opinions are based on restatements of facts that I’ve seen in a few places and would assume most people know by now, except they keep being said as if it’s going to be a new thing to most of their audience. And thus what’s holding me back is the question “does it really need to be said?” But every so often I get some ideas that seem original to me, so I’ll go ahead and shout into the chorus.
One such case is about the use of 3D in films. I’ve seen all sorts of angry and snobbish shouting about the Z-axis. I’ll break this down into the arguments:
“3D gives me headaches/nausea/makes my head explode!”
I don’t understand this effect. I have a slight sensitivity to it, but I’m prone to barometric headaches, so a dull pain in my eyes after two hours is something I’m willing to overlook. What I don’t understand isn’t that malady, it’s the cause.
Apparently, 100k fans CAN be wrong March 8, 2011
Posted by temporalparadox in Uncategorized.10 comments
It was proven this week that even in the digital age there is a barrier between fans and creators. Three weeks or so ago Nathan Fillion made an offhand comment about buying the rights to Firefly if he had the money, and suddenly the fandom lit up. He’d put a pricetag on more Big Damn Heroes. How much money have Browncoats donated to charity? Couldn’t the rights be wrested from Fox for that amount?
I can’t say if the people behind HelpNathanBuyFirefly.com took him dead serious or not, but the fact remains that his comment set wheels turning in the minds of many fans. Fox is not making new content. No other production company is licensing the property. But if an interested company could get hold of those rights, a company that cared less about profit than about making themselves and other fans happy…
Yes, several involved parties said it was a bad idea, but why exactly? I grant that there’s a trust gap when giving money to strangers, but there are methods of closing that gap. Help Nathan Buy Firefly’s plan involved Kickstarter, a service by which people pledge money, but don’t send it until what they were promised can be delivered. It’s been pointed out that the rights to Firefly are not for sale. But if an organization walked in with the right bid, would Fox really say no? Those involved in Firefly publicly made it clear they have no involvement in the HNBF project, but if a fan-owned production company was able to get to a place where they could offer jobs, who would turn down the chance to come back?
Ultimately, there is one person who must be involved to get other people on board: Joss Whedon himself. I don’t blame the others for not wanting a part of a Whedonless Firefly. And while I can understand wanting to publicly distance himself from an untried, unaffiliated business venture, why wouldn’t he wait to see if it could get legs? I can’t speak to his motives on that. Hopefully the fact that the group got this far will give him something to consider in his own endeavors.
The ultimate injustice is how the news was handed down. There was no official statement from Joss Whedon. There was no official statement at all. A hundred thousand fans were told to kindly back off by Whedon’s sister-in-law in less than 140 characters. Thousands of dreams were crushed with one tweet. It hardly seems appropriate.
This is the part where some of the more die-hard Browncoats might quote from the episode “The Message.” I’m not that hardcore. But the message from the Whedonverse is clear: “you cannot do the impossible. You are not mighty.”
PBS, I love you. Please love me back. January 5, 2011
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You used to be so cool, PBS. Back when I was a kid, you had some really awesome shows that got me excited about learning. I’m a little disappointed in some of the children’s programming these days, mainly because you have a dozen shows that teach kids how to read, but canceled Reading Rainbow, the one show that was all about teaching them why to read. But I’m not here to complain on a nostalgia platform. I am speaking from the gap in your audience.
PBS, I know your structure sets you apart from the other public television services. You only have one channel per market, so you have to limit your range of programming. You get most of your money from donations, which both limits your production values and guides your target audience. You don’t have a centralized programming production entity, but rely on member stations to create content, turning the traditional concept of a “network-affiliate” relationship upside down.
PBS, I know you have your limitations, but they result in your programming being what I would call “WASPy,” if it weren’t for the fact that, being prejudiced to the political left by financial ties, there’s not so much of the protestant faith involved. Still though, the stigma you have is that the portion of your programming that isn’t for children (only fourteen hours a day, mostly when everyone sleeps) is for snooty white intellectuals who like to talk stodgily about politics or classical music. The only kind of programming I can think of that isn’t locally produced that doesn’t have brows in the stratosphere is the woodworking shows carrying on the This Old House legacy.
I’m in my early twenties, and while I appreciate classical and jazz music, and history, many of the things you put on the air, and I’m glad that you give them a place, I feel a little left out. Although I enjoy these things occasionally and I’m glad they are given a forum, I feel like you’re not paying attention to me.
I look at other countries’ public television services, and I see legacies of great programming that does cater to me. Doctor Who, Monty Python, The Red Green Show, and many others. Programs that your stations often import to fill time. In fact, many a late night hour on my local member station is often filled with dry British sitcoms, and they designate Saturday prime time “the British Telly Club.”
Now, I may be a bit of an Anglophile myself, with my own biases, but the fact remains that you produce nothing for my demographic. It makes me a little jealous on your behalf. Why can’t PBS produce a high-quality sci-fi show that appeals to the twenty-to-forty demographic? Okay, sci-fi is pretty niche, and quality is limited by your donations and advertisers underwriters.
But couldn’t some of that money going into master-crafted children’s animation be put into winning back the lost generation? Couldn’t you put less of the time on your digital subchannels (which you are handling the best of all the networks) toward rerunning Great Performances all night and more into something that appeals to the people who are still awake at one am? Couldn’t you make an effort to reach out to make the people with the most discretionary spending throw some of it in your coffers?
If nothing else, you’d make it up on DVD sales.
Apple punts – yet another iPad reaction January 31, 2010
Posted by temporalparadox in technology, Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Since last Tuesday the “in” thing in technology is to bash the iPad. From the name to the ergonomics to the AT&T lock-in, it’s all been said, and I’m going to say it again.
For most of January, the rumors about Apple’s tablet called it the “iSlate.” It’s certainly a cooler, more dignified name than “iPad.” When over last weekend those rumors shifted to the correct name, my first thought was, “yeah, that’s what they’d call it.” At the same time, it represented a fundamental shift in my understanding of how Apple brands their products. iSlate is a “hip” name, while iPad is more “trendy.”
And while a million amateur and professional comedians knock it for sounding like a feminine hygiene product (a thought that never entered my mind), it has an effect that iSlate would not: people are talking about it by name. “iPad: just narrowly beat out TamPod.” “Geez, what a tacky name, iPad. I’m going to call it iTablet, because that sounds cooler.” “iPad? Sounds like you’re saying iPod with a Boston accent.”
I think also the Slate vs. Pad issue shows the underlying difference in paradigms between what was expected and what was offered. A Slate is written upon. A Pad is jotted. Slates are made of stone. Pads are quick and flimsy. Slates are dignified and expensive, Pads are gimmicky and cheap.
As someone who discovered Tablet computers in middle school (though I didn’t get to use one until college), I’ve been waiting for the industry to sit up and take notice of this underdog technology, but I also developed expectations of what a Tablet was.
The defining characteristic I picked up on was the stylus. You can write and draw on the screen. But that’s all I want to use the stylus for. I don’t even want it for word processing, because the human eye is far better at handwriting recognition than the technology will get before we move on from physical input.
Before the iPad, Tablet PCs were just the same old desktop archetype with stylus support thrown on top. Just as much as handwriting is intuitive for creating text and sketches, direct touch, with your fingers, is the feature nobody thought of that makes such forehead-slapping sense when Steve Jobs is waving around a 9-inch slab of metal on stage.
So I think in that sense, the iPad is a step in the right direction. But it’s too many steps in that direction. The operating system is oversimplified for the touch-input philosophy. The singletasking archetype was frustrating on the iPhone, and now Apple is asking consumers to accept it on what by rights should be a full-fledged computer.
As far as marketing, I also think Apple is getting it right, but more quietly. Anything with an Apple logo on it tends to be popular among students regardless, and iBooks is poised to do what the Kindle and Nook couldn’t: draw textbook publishers into the relatively inexpensive world of eBooks.
So Apple is bringing the Tablet to education. In my years drooling over Tablets, the most frustrating part of watching the concept flounder was that it looked like a tremendous tool for students, but was only being targeted at the business sector. Meanwhile, businessmen were happy with their Blackberrys and keeping the price of Tablets high. Students could use a Tablet to harness all the power of handwritten notes (the stylus argument again) and all the simplicity of an electronic filing system.
So here’s my final word on the iPad. Apple’s hardware is superb, but the software is just a warmed-over iPhone. I’m looking forward to seeing the industry follow Apple’s example, but I also don’t want the stylus to die. I can’t wait to see it fall into the hands of the same programmers that brought you Jailbroken iPhones. I wouldn’t Jailbreak my iTouch, but I would Jailbreak an iPad in a heartbeat.
Maybe then it would let me use Flash.
A brief note on what I’d like to see in broadcasting November 29, 2009
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I love DTV. Whenever I come home from college, I get to use it, by the virtue that my parents don’t subscribe to cable.
One thing I don’t like about it, though, is what happens on our TV when we watch pre-DTV content on a DTV station. It’s commendable that they pillarbox the 4:3 image so that you get this:
This keeps the original image, without squeezing or cropping. But our digital tuner letterboxes that image, so we get this:
That’s called Windowboxing, and I hate it with a passion. As I’m the only member of the family who cares, I set it to zoom and leave it zoomed, unless there’s a program I’m watching that takes full advantage of the wide frame. I wish I didn’t have to crop the extra, but switching zoom on and off is a tedious process that only I care about.
There is another alternative: that stations switch between 4:3 and 16:9 signals. I have seen 4:3 signals, but I don’t know the process the station needs to go through, and so I will not ask them to do it for every program format change.
I propose that stations instead put that extra space to good use, perhaps something like this:
This has the advantage of filling space and keeping the audience informed. Some difficulties would be to try to keep it from being too distracting, and burn-in from the weather map may still present some concern.
***
On a different subject, there is a way I believe DTV can improve a problem of broadcast TV. When a storm hits an area, it’s the station’s duty to give the affected regions the information they need to know, even if it means they preempt programming. However, while the area in danger is watching with rapt attention, a much larger part of that station’s served area is bored and annoyed that they are missing their shows.
I propose that in a weather emergency, broadcast stations either shunt their scheduled programming to subchannel 2, or run a ticker announcing the subchannel to watch their weather coverage on. They can even take a page from those emergency weather radios and make TVs and tuners with the capability to see a flag stating “region X needs to hear this,” and automatically tune accordingly (weather radios have a region code that activates the radio when an area is under alert).
Of course, in order for my proposal to work, cable and satellite companies would have to be required to carry at least two feeds of programming for every station, and it’s my current understanding that the FCC is more likely to take away subchanneling than adapt Must Carry to accommodate subchannels.
But that’s the future I want for broadcast. Before the Internet kills it, anyway.
In defense of Half-Blood Prince October 17, 2009
Posted by temporalparadox in movie review.add a comment
All summer and fall, everyone’s been talking about how terribly Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was adapted to the screen. So when I saw it for the first time tonight, I was as pleasantly disappointed as when I found no sacrilege in Life of Brian. (At least I was spared Graham Chapman’s penis in this movie.) WARNING: this blog will contain spoilers. If you care enough to not want to be spoiled, you have no excuse for not already knowing.
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Why I shouldn’t get a Mac July 27, 2009
Posted by temporalparadox in Rant, technology.3 comments
I was linked through Twitter to this blog, which insists that I myself, especially as a WordPress user, should get a Mac. (I will overlook the fact that never once does the article state how using WordPress specifically is better with Macs)
I wasn’t raised to blindly follow the trend, and my father especially taught me to put more thought into my computing choices. I’m not anti-Mac or pro-PC. I believe in the right tool for the right job. What I am is anti-parrot. And this article parrots a lot of common arguments. It even starts off with one that gets me ranting.
Copyright in the digital age May 1, 2009
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I heard an article on NPR about an author releasing a book on copyright in the digital age. (Related article here) Apparently, this book stems from his experience publishing an article in the New York Times on extending copyright life. According to the interview in the broadcast piece, his thesis was on extending it from its current 70 to 80-100 years past the death of the author, in order to allow grandchildren to benefit as well as children. He was met with an onslaught of online criticism and scorn.
I’m very sorry that the legions of the internet attacked this man, because I agree with the thesis of his original article on copyright, or at least I can sympathize. The creator of a work and their family should certainly profit from it. However, everything that followed sounds like a man grasping at straws where he expected a ladder to always be.
I particularly bristled at his response to mashups/remixes. Certainly a specific author has a right to refuse their work to be reused, but what about the other person’s right to create? With proper attribution, a reasonable amount of I.P. should be fine for sampling.
The real dilemma of the digital age is following the rules in an environment where the rules are easier circumvented than allowed for. This calls for two things: easier rules and a stronger honor system. Will we ever eliminate piracy? No, but we can engineer a society where it is looked down on. But in order to get there, we have to make it easier to cut the fat and get right to what we want to do. This means more education on licensing and intellectual rights, less fiddly locks that are easily bypassed by those with intent but exclude honest people.
Prices need to come down, and the distributors seem to be in the line of fire here. In a time when any independent band can get themselves hosting and release albums (or individual songs) for direct download, what is the role of the label? Permanent media are becoming obsolete, and if the consumer really does want a CD, they can bake their own in two minutes for under ten cents a disc.
Print is neither exempt nor doomed. Ebook readers are nowhere near ready to take the full load of reading. It’s impossible to say if printed books will ever die as a medium, but if they do, it won’t be in our time, perhaps not even in our children’s time. People want something to hold, something large enough to read at arm’s length.
However, still the traditional publisher model is on the way out. Mass runs of books have to stick to what is popular, but what if you could take the raw data and print a book whenever you wanted? You can. Kiosks are entering the market that can print and bind a complete book in a couple minutes. Compare to spending half an hour in a bookstore and leaving disappointed because they don’t have room on the shelves for it. Sorry, Pocket Books. Adapt or die.
We are going through a catastrophic shift in the Way Things Work, and moving through it much faster than any previous change. At least one industry is going to evolve into something unrecognizable. If publishers and record labels survive, they will only if they stop being sellers of items and start being information brokers.
Just like everyone else, I’m worried about this change. But while the Old Guard is worried about their way of life ending, I’m afraid of what it will become, particularly because it’s the Old Guard moderating that change right now. In the long run, perhaps the best outcome is for the existing companies to die, making room for younger companies that know what’s really going on.
But for myself, I hope that’s not the case. Because I’ll be graduating right into that mess. What the media need to do is wake up and realize that the world is different, and then adapt to that, instead of moaning about how things have changed.
Things have changed, and they’re not done changing yet. It remains to the corporations to change with them or die.
