March 2009 Archives

I'm leaving MovableType behind, and taking my blog off to Google's Blogger service at:

  essays.ajs.com

Please come join me there, where I'll continue to share my thoughts on whatever comes to mind.

In a recent article, Wired covered a case where the ACLU is suing a Pennsylvania prosecutor who in turn was pressing child porn charges against three teens who photographed themselves in a series of suggestive poses (and in one girl's case, with exposed breasts) and distributed those images to friends at school. What bothers me far more than the prosecutor's claims, which will likely never go anywhere, was the comments posted to the article. Almost all of them were some form of outrage that these girls were being treated as sex offenders for having taken pictures of their own bodies. However, one of them was the following:

"How can anyone think that the ACLU is right in this case? I'm not an advocate of government involvement in most cases, but these kids have no idea what they are doing when they take these pictures and distribute them at 13 years old. Guess, what - pixels don't forget."

Ignoring the fact that the very phrase "have no idea what they are doing," should be a clear indicator of how the law should treat them, I feel that this comment and the people who might make similar comments deserve more than a one-off comment. There are many reasons that this doesn't really make any sense, here.

1. No one is saying that these girls were behaving responsibly
2. No one is saying that we should encourage such behavior
3. The girls involved will almost certainly have to deal with some degree of ongoing fallout from this case (at the very least, they'll probably put up with a lot of off-color teasing and humiliation at school)
4. This case is entirely about the inappropriate use of child porn laws being used to brand a young person as a child pornographer for making and distributing photographs of themselves to their friends.

But to claim that we should destroy the hopes and dreams of a minor (and that's what being branded as a child pornographer will do) for giving their friends a picture of themselves in a provocative pose or even while naked or partially naked, is entirely disproportionate. If the goal is to teach an important life lesson, then you confiscate their phone for a year and charge them with public indecency.

There are two reasons you don't charge them with child pornography. The first is detailed above. The second reason is that doing so dilutes the moral condemnation of real child pornography, which creates an environment which fosters physical and sexual abuse of minors, human trafficking and other severe and horrible social ills that have no parallels in this case.

If we forget that, we lose our way, and run the risk of hurting the children that we sought to protect.

I won't review Tales as if it were a stand-alone work. That would be unfair, since it's the B-story inside a larger work. Instead, I'll deal with its merits as an adjunct to the Watchmen film.

First off, the details. I got Freighter on Blu-Ray which was probably overkill. The animation quality isn't really that impressive, and DVD might have been the better choice in order to let its slightly retro look blend a bit more rather than having every pencil line (yep, hand drawn by Korean animators) pop out of my screen. It's animated in a very Heavy Metal style, though it's much smoother and obviously computer-colored. I think it's a good look, and certainly a less realistic style was the right choice to pair with Watchmen's over-sharpened reality.

More below...

Joss Whedon, Ron Moore. These are giants of the TV F&SF genres. They've created such giants as Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Deep Space Nine, Firefly and so on. They also have a tell.

In poker, a tell is some sort of signal that you give unconsciously that can indicate how you feel about your cards. In terms of genre TV, it's a simpler thing. When you watch season 6 and 7 of Buffy or season 4 of Battlestar Galactica and you start to see the main characters suffering, crying, going berserk, acting self-destructively, having tantrums and breakdowns... that's would appear to be a tell. It's a sign that your creative forces have moved on to a new project. Perhaps not entirely, but the show you are watching is no longer their primary focus.

Joss Whedon was moving on from Buffy to Firefly when seasons 6 and 7 started to suffer and Buffy spent most of her time boinking Spike or gloomily declaring that she was no longer fit to lead. Ron Moore was working on the Battlestar Galactica prequel series, Caprica,  when season 4 of BSG started to really lay into Adama. He cried more in half a season than he did in the entirety of the rest of the series, ended up on the floor/ground with some kind of liquid all over him (alcohol, Cylon repair goo, vomit) three times and generally had a series of Really Bad Days. So the next time you see a fantasy or science fiction show (even if it's on the SyFylis network) start to abuse its main characters, you'll know there's something new coming...

Sadly, I have to get rid of some of my books. If you're just reading my blog, you can skip this article. This is just here for friends I'm offering books to.

I've thought more about SyFy (the new name for the SciFi channel), and I think the obligation falls to the science fiction fans to show the skiffy channel the error of their ways. Syence Fyction conventions should spring up across the land, promoting all of the least socially accepted traits of fandom: costuming, anthro, Japanese tentacle porn, slash, etc. These events should never refer to themselves as SyFy (after all, that's a trademarked term, I'm sure). No, they should just make it clear what segement of fandom is embracing this change in terminology. They should make it public, loud, and loving! I for one will pledge to avoid bathing for the events and cite Cherry 2000 and Galaxina as genre-defining works as often as I can get a reporter to listen.

Perhaps... and I say this with great cynicism, tempered with a just a bit of hope; perhaps then we can get someone in charge at the channel to realize that you change the audience perception by changing the quality of the content, not by changing the name and ordering more Ghost Hunters.

According to numerous sources including a New York Times article and the original press release, the SciFi channel will be re-branding itself the SyFy channel. This is what they have to say for themselves:

"By changing the name to Syfy, which remains phonetically identical, the new brand broadens perceptions and embraces a wider range of current and future imagination-based entertainment beyond just the traditional sci-fi genre, including fantasy, supernatural, paranormal, reality, mystery, action and adventure."

First off, they're dead-wrong on the pronunciation. Try as they may to direct people to continue to pronounce that so that it rhymes with eye, the obvious thing to do is to start calling it "sifee," which many, many posters to the scifi-wire press release immediately pointed out sounded like a shortened version of "syphilis."

But that's not the worst of it, and sadly a name change is only a symptom of the greater problem, here.

You hear a lot about the advent of "microblogging" today, but in my opinion the best compromise between the point-to-point burst of IM and the prose-heavy burden of broadcast blogging is Google Reader. At first, it looks like an RSS reader, but it's really a whole lot more (in about the same way that Twitter is a whole lot more than Web-bound SMS). For example, if you look at my shared items on Google Reader, you'll see that I've got comments on most of the items I've shared. Some of the things I share are from my own sites, but most are from the Web in general. News, photographs. Whatever I'm reading tends to get shared, and the stream-of-consciousness ranges from political commentary to gaping at gadgets to thinking out loud about photography.

This is what I'd really like to use Twitter for, but it can be too cumbersome at times to compress my thoughts plus a link into 140 characters. Sometimes there's just too much context for that.

On the Jimmy Fallon Show tonight, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht asked all of the viewers to follow Bryan Brinkman, a random audience member who used Twitter, but was fairly new to it. He's gotten over 15,000 followers since the show was taped, and it's still climbing rapidly.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure what it says about social networking. Perhaps it underscores the power of a late night TV show to engage its audience with a product more than anything. It's been done before. Stephen Colbert got his viewers to vandalize Wikipedia and vote for his name being put on a bridge and a space station module, so why not keep it going? Get people to go out and buy the sponsor's product online.

Perhaps this is the future of TV advertising as DVRs render commercials moot.

I'm doing a lot of work in Python these days, and while I like a lot of things about the language, and have even gotten over the things that initially bothered me, there are some structural things that make little sense to me. Autovivification (or more specifically, the lack of it) is high on that list.

In Perl, when you want to store the number of bytes of traffic that have been seen in a log file for a specific system on a specific day, you do something like this:

$logdata{$host}{$day}{bytes} += $number_of_bytes;

Nice and simple. In Python, that's:

logdata.setdefault(host,{})
logdata[host].setdefault(day,{})
logdata[host][day].setdefault('bytes',0)
logdata[host][day]['bytes'] += number_of_bytes
# UPDATE: note that this can be simplified to:
h = logdata.setdefault(host,{})
d = h.setdefault(day,{})
d.setdefault('bytes',0)
d['bytes'] += number_of_bytes
# It's still annoying, but certainly shorter.

The other item that comes up, here, is auto-quoting. I really miss being able to say:

$foo{bar}

rather than

foo['bar']

I don't know why I find quotes to be so cumbersome when I don't find brackets to be. It's just a feeling that I'm doing a lot of extra work to say, "this is the thing I wanted to look up." Then again, quoting in Perl is vastly superior on so many levels that it's a rather moot point. From the balanced quoting operators:

$pseudo-text = q{/\/\ & /\/\s};
$python = qq{a = { 'a':1 }
             b = """Another '''day'''\nAnother \$"""};
$perl = q{$c = qq{Hello, world\n}};

to its powerful combination of regular expression text and code:

s{ perl \s* \{ (.*) \} }{ $1 }eesx;

Again, I love Python. It has a great object system and much cleaner function declaration syntax than Perl. I just wish it weren't so annoying sometimes (a feeling that I'm sure Python programmers have when using Perl). Perhaps someday, those of us who enjoy both languages will get together and write a new one. Maybe we'll call it Ruby. ;-)

The New Yorker has an interesting review of "Watchmen" up on their site. After reading Roger Ebert's review earlier, I was certainly interested to see how someone would pan "Watchmen." Ebert was quite positive on it, but I know that the film won't appeal to everyone, so when I heard the New Yorker had panned it, I thought we'd get a good contrast with the Ebert review. Sadly, nothing could be farther for the truth. The New Yorker (or more specifically, Anthony Lane) apparently finds more interest in calling a movie (and its fans) names than in finding true flaws to criticize. After all, the latter would require treating the subject matter with respect, and when you walk in with a set of assumptions about how bad something will be, respect isn't the first item on the menu.

Where Ebert saw, "another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie," it seems that what Lane watched was, "a project from which all tenderness has been excised, and which prefers to paint mankind as a bevy of brutes." To be fair to Lane, he's hit the nail on the head. To be less generous, however, I don't think he understands what he's just said or the value proposition which "Watchmen" offers. It's not a tender film (or book), and while it doesn't exactly paint humanity as brutes, what it has to say isn't very kind. Dr. Manhattan compares the human race to termites in a throw-away line at the end of the story. In "Watchmen," we are meant to observe the human race in much the same way that an entomologist would. We see mankind strive for certain ideals (love, peace, justice) and ultimately express their flaws and baser natures. Even love-making is tragically flawed in "Watchmen," being expressed as rape, clumsy fumbling that ends prematurely, or a passionate embrace that results in a dangerous and literally inflammatory accident.

OK, I got off topic there, and started doing my own review. Back to Lane and Ebert...

I walked into Watchmen expecting it to be adequate, but mostly a let-down. The original changed the way I related to the superhero genre and informed my interpretation of everything that came after. I'm not going to say that the movie didn't make me cringe once or twice. There were some minor changes that I thought were unfortunate, but by way of comparison to just about any superhero genre film in the past 20 years, I was floored by the level of fidelity.

Fidelity to the original, however, does not always make for a good film. So, did it work on the big screen? Good gods, yes! I think that there's a class of people who will walk out of Watchmen with a profound frustration, but the majority of viewers are going to be in for a treat, and one that won't let them off the hook easily. There are going to be quite a few parking-lot conversations about the nature of justice and how a woman can forgive her attacker.

I'll dodge into spoiler territory after the break...

SPOILERS BELOW

A friend of mine just asked a question I've been asked many times before. I'll re-phrase his question in a different way than he asked it at first:

How do I evaluate a string from user-data safely so that I can gather configuration settings from an external file?

This is a really common situation. What you often see in Perl code is something like this:

if ($config =~ /^\s*set\s*(\w+)\s*=\s*(.*)/) {
  eval "\$$1 = '$2'";
}

and as my friend rightly pointed out, this is not only dangerous, but really just asking to be ostracized from the company of your peers. What you're asking Perl to do is to evaluate a random string as if it were valid code. What if that ".*" matched something with a single-quote in it? What if that "\w+" matched the name of one of Perl's internal variables or one of your program's variables?

I've read the reviews from the die-hard fans of the Watchmen comic (of which, I suppose I'm one). I'm not an innocent. I understand that a Hollywood movie based on great source material has about an 80% chance of sucking. So why won't Watchmen suck? Because of several things: 1) the reviews uniformly indicate that Snyder got most of it dead-on 2) Alan Moore's genius was not in the final two issues of Watchmen, but in the entire story 3) while fans will recoil at the changes in the ending, the vast majority of viewers will not have read the book, and will see this as a new work, whole and complete.

I don't think that I have to point out how wrong it would be to make a dance mix of Rain (from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, which restored my faith in Japanese musical artistry), but someone felt the need to do it. My eternal complaint about Rain is that there are two versions on the C.B. soundtracks. One is by a female artist who has a lovely voice that's just perfect for the song, but she gets the pacing rather muddled and occasionally ends up turning a slightly awkward line into a train-wreck of syllables. The other version is by a male artist who absolutely nails the song in terms of timing and flow, but he just doesn't have the voice for it. I've always wanted to hear the perfect version of this song... and now I get a third problem: the dance mix. Why? Why?!

Sigh.