The Cake is a Lie

Everyone's favorite misanthropic organization, PETA, recently released a Cooking Mama ripoff, ostensibly to protest of the original game's inclusion of delicious, nutritious food. Since most of the dishes in Cooking Mama are traditional Japanese fare, PETA might actually be protesting Japanese culture here; the distinction is unclear. In any case, they've actually managed to improve the game a bit, and I doubt even PETA cares enough about real animals to not enjoy savagely eviscerating their respective digital avatars. While the cartoonish supervillainy inherent in PETA's typical list of suggested environmental improvements ranges from eliminating millions of jobs to displacing thousands of homeowners, I draw the line at the ham-handed inference that murdering something in a video game should make me feel the least bit guilty, (unless you count the Weighted Companion Cube.)
I suppose one could take this whole thing as a sign of our larger success as a species. The rationalization process for PETA's existence starts with the idea that humans are so well adapted for survival that we have to engage in self-sabotage just to keep our numbers down. Follow that line of thinking through to its' logical conclusion and you end up with PETA. The E in PETA is supposed to stand for Ethical, (which is as hilariously subjective as the M in FEMA,) a term that PETA has broadened to include the promotion of under-aged drinking on college campuses in an apparent effort to reduce dairy consumption. That's right, PETA hates milk enough to suggest Milwaukee's Best as a suitable replacement for enjoying your Captain Crunch. PETA's been working overtime paving the road to hell of late, but I can't imagine the "Got Beer" campaign was all that well-intentioned. I know half a dozen hot girls who can stand to drink Silk, and seem no worse for the wear. Put a beer in their hands, and suddenly they're dry humping the fridge door. Subtlety, it seems, doesn't evoke enough outrage. Like most organizations whose membership numbers less than the distinct subset "people who went to see Meet Joe Black," the disdainful public perception of PETA is eerily accurate. In an ironic twist, Shithouse Squirrels everywhere locked arms in protest.

What follows is an actual transcript of the events around 3AM, on November 7, 2008 in the Belmont Shores area of Long Beach, California, in the alley near the intersection of Ocean and Bay Shore.

The author was up late, writing, and began transcribing the events as he heard them.

*Tires spin and an engine revs. The sound is very brief, lasting less than a second.

First Male Voice: Come here.

Second Male Voice: Uhh… Are you serious?

FMV: Come down the stairs now.

SMV: Seriously? I live here man.

FMV: Come here now.

SMV: Jesus! You’re pointing a gun at me!

FMV: Come down the stairs and get on the ground now.

SMV: (emphatic) YOU. ARE. POINTING. A. GUN. AT. ME!!

FMV: Put your hands behind your head.

*Several seconds of silence follow and then..

*The unmistakable crackle of an electrical arc.

Female Voice: Oh my god, they killed him!

SMV: (Screaming, not dead but clearly in intense pain)

FMV: (speaking in a low murmur, indistinguishable)

SMV: (Still in obvious pain, through tears) I fucking live here man, I fucking live here. This is my door. Twenty Bay Shore, Apartment Nine.

*followed by roughly thirty minutes of “I live here” and several other police cars arriving. In the end nobody was arrested and they all drove away.

So I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m guessing one of my neighbors got tazed tonight. Gosh don’t you wish you lived here.

Perchance Nothing

(I just discovered this post that was saved as a draft but never submitted. Better late than never I guess?)

I don't dream very often. I've always suspected this is a consequence of the copious amounts of medication I took throughout my youth, but who knows whether or not that is true? In any case, I just had a rare dream, and will now attempt to relate as much as possible to you.

I have just finished up a conversation with some minor comedian whose name I wouldn't be able to recall in the waking world anyway, we are standing on a tree-lined street by my old elementary school playground. Up walks Last Comic Standing host Jay Mohr, and I flag him down and tell him how I can't believe my incredible luck meeting two comedians in one day. We talk briefly about comedy and television, he says he hasn't heard good things about the previous comic, and then goes on his way. Across the street from me is a garage sale, so I cautiously wander over and who should I find but Robert Stack. Wow, I think, this is a real celebrity, not just a TV celebrity like Jay Mohr or the first guy. I notice a brown box full of old records, the one on top is the soundtrack to an experimental feminist film produced by Disney in the early seventies, called Dau Fratham. It is an operatic musical about a futuristic society where women are second class citizens. It tells the story of a man who hunts and kills four criminal women before committing suicide, and is told through the eyes of a fifth woman, the title character, who ends the film with a melancholy aria. We don't talk about the details of the film, but they're all there in my memory anyway, as though I'm some expert on Disney's experimental feminist movement. Stack comments that he knew the woman who played Dau Fratham. I haven't seen the film but I do know her from her voice work on a much more family friendly Disney film. Stack ends up buying the record for fifty cents, telling me that it is probably the last copy in existence and is worth much more than that. As he departs I leaf through the brown box of records but find nothing else of value.


So yeah, good luck interpreting THAT. Go on, I dare you.

YA Website

I'm posting twice on the same subject, so you know I'm serious.
An oft-cited maxim is that you're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution. I've never been a fan of these kind of polarizing statements because they promote the kind of "Us vs Them" mentality that leads to unpleasant things like College football fans, Political protesters, and suicide bombers.
However.
The idea is not totally without merit, and there is a yawning gulf between the Young American's internet potential and its' actual online achievements.
It is my intention to clearly outline my proposal for the Young Americans digital experience, with the clear understanding that in this instance, those with the power to change things are a decidedly different subset than those with the desire to change things.

1. Fix the YA website.

The YA Website is a perfect online representation of the YA Warehouse. The comparison is both unflattering and instructive: it exists as an outmoded, cumbersome, and generally embarrassing front for what is in reality an international non-profit entity. Someone's "best efforts" aren't commendable just because their services come cheaply, and even improved aesthetics and design principles won't fix the site's architecture problems.
The front page should load quickly and act as nothing more than a hub to other places. Send convention show clients to a place where they can look at publicity photos, short performance clips, and see a list of the groups long and storied success as entertainment for corporate events. Keep it simple and quick, and let your corporate clients know that hiring you puts them in the esteemed company of some of top corporations in the world (Coke, IBM, Dodge, etc.)
The Outreach section should be subdivided into specific sections for teachers and students. A simple feedback section will ensure a constant string of positive testimonials, (with incorporated editorial control of course,) and the site needs a much, much more efficient submission medium for photo submission other than email.

More to come if I still care later.

Watchmen

I want to refrain from posting about comics on here, since whatever I write will virtually be a retread of what I read on Daniel's blog, but in this one specific instance, I'm going to make an exception.

The upcoming Watchmen film has thrust the book itself back into the limelight, and with it hardcore fans are scrambling in their attempt to explain why the film is a bad idea. One of the main sticking points here is that it is impossible to maintain both the purity of the work and the spirit behind it. History suggests Zack Snyder will go for the former; it is easier to shoot Fearful Symmetry frame by frame than it is to riff on genre deconstruction and Reaganomics. A Watchmen movie that followed the spirit of the book would be a very odd thing indeed. Ironically the renewed aggressions of Mother Russia and the housing/banking crisis have done such a job of twisting the political landscape into a familiar old shape, that the viral marketing gurus at Warner Brothers are scratching their heads and wondering if they don't have superpowers themselves. Still, by all rights, shouldn't a Watchmen movie rip apart the superhero film genre? Of course this is Hollywood so instead of a follow up to Unbreakable "deconstructing the genre" gives us Hancock. Be careful what you wish for.

I've got to be honest here. From a modern perspective, the supposed subversion and deconstruction of the hero genre really is a quaint silver-age conceit. (By the way Green Lantern Green Arrow was doing the "real world problems" thing fifteen years earlier.) We read comics in a post Watchmen, post Crisis, post Dark Knight Returns world. Hell if it comes to that, we read comics in a post Sandman, post Bone, post Maus world. We live in a time when Penny Arcade has more readers than Spiderman, when you can go to any chain bookstore and pick up copies of Flight Vol. 1, Pride of Baghdad, and Transmetropolitan and put them in the same basket. Where you can go online and debate which 1995 debut: JtHM, Astro City, or Preacher affected the industry the most, while comparing top 200 sales figures for June, July, and August, and watching youtube videos of a guy making fun of The Dark Knight with his action figures.

Watchmen is a great book, but in the way Citizen Kane is a great movie. It is the pinnacle of the genre, but completely lost on everyone but the history students.

Friend Requests.

Let me be clear: I have no immediate issues befriending “Young Americans” on facebook. Saying I have no immediate issues isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement either. Let’s all agree that putting “Young Americans” on facebook, (and as person rather than a group or application,) is a specious move at best; it smacks of the same vein of misapprehensions regarding trend and technology the group has been dancing with virtually since its’ inception.

First of all, who are the target “friends” for this? Either it is the current and recent members of the group itself, or it is workshop participants. If it is the former: the technology that allows implementation of a Young Americans facebook account immediately makes the idea obsolete. The group members are already well connected to one another, both in the social and digital sense. The technology is digital, but these things still have to grow organically to have any sense of permanence. A Young American facebook profile exists on the extreme periphery of those social relationships, and paying digital lip service to the group by accepting friend requests on facebook isn’t enough to keep the idea alive or even relevant past the initial accept. You’ve got a Young Americans facebook account. What exactly do you plan to do with it?

If- rather than the Young Americans- the target is workshop participants, then you have the opposite problem. The children in a workshop quickly grow accustomed to specific relationships which are fostered and maintained through interpersonal interaction. Obviously this is something a facebook profile can not provide. Nor can you hope to provide any manner of personalized feedback. Instead of becoming irrelevant the profile becomes a letdown. “Thank you for participating in our workshop. Look for us in three years,” isn’t any easier to swallow clad in digital trappings. “Hey we connected on such a personal level, please visit our website, you can check out these pictures from the seventies." Gee, thanks.

Having said that, the entire YA digital experience is already something of a letdown. Sure the site is the first result on google, but it is easily skipped over because the associated preview text simply tells us that our browser doesn’t support frames. Great. We went through the trouble of a google bomb in order to outrank the wikipedia article about that Bowie song, only to have kids (whose eyes- studies suggest- are trained to skip over seemingly irrelevant links with higher page ranks,) ignore us. In fact judging by the preview text the most promising result on Google page one is a trashlink to yaoffice.ehost-services115 or somesuch. So now they get 404’d.

Then we get to the website itself, which only took two tries to load this time! Again, who is this for? Common sense would suggest it is for the kids who have taken the workshop. Current YA's aren't visiting the site for the same reason they're not keeping up with the Young American facebook persona, Parents can't get pictures of their kids or information about the college, and alumni seem to stick to their mailing list. The other guess is the convention show clientele, most of whom have trouble remember much after the moon landing. Odds are they’re not looking to be dazzled by a killer website. Still, instead of separate websites for business, outreach, current YA’s, and alumni, everything is crammed into a slow-loading mess. Young American leaders often lay claim to their own vaunted proficiencies regarding design principles. This philosophy clearly doesn’t carry over to the website. I could do an entire article on how the YA website represents epic failure for each adjective listed in the Google User Experience Design Principles.

The problem, of course, lies in the very linear thinking behind virtually all Young Americans web-based endeavors. The group needs a flickr account more than it needs a facebook account, for starters. There is literally no justifiable reason why photo, audio, and video content isn’t pouring in, excepting that the channels for creative contribution are being blocked. You want a successful online strategy? Access and control needs to be opened up to the people who have the ability to actually create and manipulate meaningful content. The very content that by all rights should’ve been showcased on the site all along. Digital proliferation is meaningless when you’ve got a single access point. Copies of the keys to the kingdom need to be handed out both liberally and quickly. Alexandria is burning; fresh coats of paint aren’t going to cut it anymore.

The other option is the safer one, in which the Young Americans as an organization goes about its business and doesn't attempt these blind and often ill-advised forays into the digital landscape. "Make it work" doesn't apply as much as "look before you leap." Actually, the appropriate idiom should be "L2P or GTFO." I'll probably get in trouble for that last one. And you wonder why I don't blog much.