RT @(redacted): Most girls that I know or have met look prettier without makeup. Just sayin’, ladies…

I understand that tweet was well intentioned, but it may as well have read:

HEY LADIES MY SENSE OF AESTHETICS HAS RESULTED IN A NEW DICTUM FOR YOUR APPEARANCE

Hey guys, how about we stop assuming that women’s looks are our business? Let’s acknowledge women’s liberty to act according to their personal tastes, eh?

I file into the back of the overflow room as Steve Jobs begins his keynote. I’m jaded. I’m here to learn how to make things, not to hear about things I can buy. Steve starts talking and I find myself immediately engaged. It’s because Steve cares. He has money. He has other projects. He could quit at any moment and retain his Silicon Valley badass status. Yet he stays. He cares. It shows. There are some bits of horseshit — a claim that the AppStore is the most vibrant application platform in the world, a claim that is true only with many qualifications — and a maudlin advertisement for FaceTime on the RetinaDisplay featuring a deaf pregnant soon-to-be mother signing to a soldier on deployment. Nevertheless I found myself stomping my feet in excitement and salivating for the next iteration of the iPhone, and it was largely due to the inclusion of a videocamera and on-phone video editing. I left the auditorium with a profound belief that this new product solved every communications and media problem that humanity could possibly face. Hell, with its glass case, when held to a window, it can even make rainbows.

Apple – Steve – sells a dream. Although Apple, yes, likes money, and will gladly make money on endless passive consumption, they never lost their vision of how computer can be used to aid creation and experssion and experience. Frustrations with linux, its community in particular, drove me ambivalently towards the Mac platform just because it worked, but I was sold on Apple in early 2008. It was an anniversary with a beloved (now ex-) girlfriend. We’d gone out in the morning for a walk around Boston, visited an aquarium, and shared a cappuccino before heading home. I remember only snippets of the day. When we got home, I plugged my camera into my computer and started uploading the photos from the day. Meanwhile the girlfriend and I made a playlist of our favorite music to listen to while we cooked dinner together. Then it hit me: with the photos in iLife and the playlist in iTunes, we could have a slideshow with music to recap our day. We started prepping our dinner. As we washed greens, cut carrots and onions, and made dressing for our salads, we stole glances at the Mac. By the time the salad was served we scrapped the rest of our dinner plans, shoved an organic vegetarian local-grown frozen pizza in the oven and cuddled on the couch.

And with the iPhone 4, I imagine myself having a day out with a friend making ad-hoc movies and editing them into something vaguely watchable, at least for us, on the train ride home.

This is narcissism, yes, but it’s valuable. This is how we remember our lives and our world.

A recent class assignment involved creating a two-player game. I liked the idea of videogame mashups (a friend made Joust Pong) and wanted to experiment with the idea of different rulesets per player, thus Pong Invaders was born, a game where one player controls the space invaders while another player controls the iconic pong paddle in a grand badminton battle involving kamikaze aliens and lasers.

Controls:

One player controls the pong paddle at the bottom of the screen using keys: o,p

Another player controls the invaders at the top of the screen using keys: z,x. Can fire from a random invader when the meter is charged using mouse button.

Don’t miss the ball, don’t run out of invaders, don’t touch the laser.

Download Pong Invaders

We currently have one chapter active in Boston, MA.

>                 reveals
>                 >         >                 >         >         >
>                 >
>                 >         itself as
>                 >         >                 futile and you have no
>                 >         >                 >         idea why
>                 >         >                 >         >         you’re
>                 >         >                 >         >         >
>                 sitting there
>                 >         >                 >         >         >
>                 >         with
>                 >
>
>
>
> –

This piece was composed by plundering spam titles that were themselves plundered from Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen.

in the forest was a well, there he sat and cried
Against a grimed hand when his own’s quite dust
Hast thou no place in all their heritage
But here I pray that none whom I once loved
My head hangs weighed with snow
as possible beneath the smoke. Presently he saw open space, and the green
is she going by herself, lying in his grave?

The first piece is DJambalaya, a playlist creation application for the iPhone that can be used on its own or to control a remote computer. Cole and I wanted to create an application that would allow a person to dynamically change playlists at a party without having to duck out of an interaction. The goal was to enable the user to queue up about 30 minutes of music in about the time it takes to send a text message – a socially acceptable break in conversation. To do this, we had to create an interface that allowed for fast movements aided by some form of music recommendation to prevent cases of obsessiveness in finding “the perfect track”, an obsessiveness that leads to unfortunate dallying in selections. After a user selects a ‘seed’ artist, we’re going to hit last.fm to provide waves of related artists, speeding the selection process by only presenting the user with a small number of valid choices as opposed to the hundreds or thousands of choices available if an entire library were exposed.

Here’s a screenshot of the iPhone app circa mid-November after a couple days of development after learning the iPhone SDK. We hit some delays due to holidays and beginning-of-the-year business, but we’re preparing to ramp up development once again.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay

Alan Kay’s famous phrase reads as inspirational. I support the spirit of it entirely as it accords with the American spirit, the hacker ethos, the do-it-yourself revolutionary philosophy. It’s comforting and empowering to think that all it takes is some elbow-grease and ingenuity to make a difference, shape society, right wrongs. And although I certainly don’t intend to discourage cultural participation, I find troublesome implications in that statement.

The first problem is that an invention needs to be adopted before that invention is able to define the future. Alan is proposing a form of technological determinism: he is subtly implying that technology drives society, rather than the reverse. I find this belief dubious. How and why inventions are adopted is controversial; if there were a formula for determining relevant technology, there would obviously be no failed startups, no failed product launches. But we know that the marketplace is a fickle mistress. Sticking to technology, why did CISC win the computer instruction set wars? Why is Outlook a prominent email/personal management client? It’s clear that in the marketplace, sometimes good ideas fail and bad ideas succeed.

Also lacking is any consideration for how the presence of technology affects societal behavior. Taking a cue from Infinite Jest, would it be good to invent a film so entertaining that it permanently paralyses its viewers with the need to endlessly consume it? More practically and perhaps more damagingly: why have we adopted so much technology that we’re living in a fashion that our ecosystem cannot sustain?

Stepping back from computers for a moment, let’s look at inventions and technology as ideas. We tend to look at the physical products, the signifiers of technology, as the technology itself. But technology exists in the idea space; we’re really looking at ideas. Language is a technology. Government is a technology. And so on. Many good social technologies have not been adopted. Say, civil unions. And why is it so hard to deter Americans from creationism? Many wonderful things that are not economically expedient have been invented.

Convincing people to adopt GUIs (One of Alan Kay’s major innovations in the tech-space) is easy. We need to invent a way to get people addicted to ethics, to reason, to justice.

When I expanded my reading in the genre to lesser authors, in part to know my competition, in part to find easily deconstructed text, I began to feel that the mode of hysterical realist writing is easily misused. (I’ll refrain from mentioning any writers lest I prematurely burn bridges.) The primary difference is that these authors appear to provide details for the sake of details. A gun used to shoot someone is described beyond the make, beyond the model, all the way down to the geolocation of its specific production. Yet that history and that location are irrelevant to the story and explain none of the constituent forces driving or holding together the element’s of the author’s world. Unlike the authors mentioned above, this story would map like a branch with sticks jutting out. Though these sticks increase the overall area of the total story, they frequently fail to reconnect and add to the primary narrative.

This usage of excessive details has uncomfortable corollaries – one could argue that detail for the sake of detail, that is, meaningless maximalism, cheapens the art of writing and devalues the reader. A strength of writing is that the author has extremely fine-grained control over how much information the reader is given, arguably moreso than in other forms of expression. Constantly writing with detail at full bore (pun intended) is like composing music without rhythm or dynamics. Worse still is that it allows the reader less agency. Law and Order, by its philosophy and its medium, is intended to be as representational as possible and allow no questions on the part of the viewer – the viewer is allowed to stop thinking and witness melodrama with absolute resolution and justice. Maximalism ideally should give the reader more to consider; misused it thinks for the reader and replace’s the reader’s imagination. Consider the reader. Consider the reader’s mind.