Category: Connections
I’ve had a long and passionate love affair with iamcal’s Noted, a lightweight text editor that is everything Notepad ought to be. It has toolbar search and replace. It can read and convert linebreaks from (or to) any OS. It has an unlimited buffer size. It has no associations in the annoying editor wars. It counts lines and even lets you jump to them! And that’s almost exactly all it does. Noted is great.
The only things it doesn’t have that I wish it had are a tabbed interface like Firefox and a word counter so I could stop using stupid MS Word. The former would probably be very complex to implement, but the latter shouldn’t be too hard. I checked the Noted page again today to see if its source was available. It is! So I poked around and discovered that it’s written in… Pascal.
That’s really weird. People still write in Pascal? (Maybe not, as Noted hasn’t been updated in a couple years.) I used it as a training language in my sophomore year of high school–it was fun but bad for me, as it gave me lots of procedural habits that I had to break before I got good at OOP. A glance at Noted’s code just now mostly made sense, although it also shows some indications of classes, which I don’t recall in Pascal. For that matter, I never knew Pascal could do native Windows GUI apps.
I do realize that there are form-based web pages that count words, but unfortunately I haven’t found one as smart as Word’s tool, which isn’t all that smart. I also realize that I could write a form-based PHP script that would be as smart as Word’s word-counter (and probably will do so), but I’d really rather have it in a text editor; Noted is almost perfect for my needs, and browser textboxes aren’t.
For a long time I pretended not to play RPGs
More than a third (it used to be more than half) of the things I’ve bookmarked at del.icio.us/xorphus are related to role-playing, in theory and practice. I wasn’t sure why, exactly, until a couple of days ago. Hopefully in a few days it will become clear to you too.
Anyway, one of the links I just got around to reading today is the brilliant Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore. Unfortunately it doesn’t have permalinks or anything, but if you scroll down you’ll get to an entry called “A Small Thing About Suspense,” which suddenly makes clear to me things I should have realized a long time ago about scenario creation and writing in general.
I want to design games for a living, but I come up with ideas for stories much more often than I come up with ideas for games. I want to reduce that ratio, and I’m hoping all this reading and That Which Will Become Clear will help.
Mr. Burns, referral-log ninja, writes in with corrections:
“My point about writing vs. art is that good
writing can excuse bad art — and I won’t trash art in a webcomic,
typically. Just not my thing. The exception is when the art fails to
execute the strip properly (in other words, if you can’t tell what’s
happened or the viewer gets the wrong impression). That would get the
same critical response as bad writing would.
The theoretical reverse is also true — if a strip has bad writing but
gorgeous art, I might well read and snark on it too, and if I did, it’d
likely be to extol the art, not slam the writing.”
I stand corrected. By those corrections.
One thing I should have mentioned in that post was that it is a typical failing of critics to respond badly, even childishly, to criticism of their own work. That’s a trait wholly absent in Mr. Burns, who always responds (and I do mean “always responds”) to discussion of Websnark with equanimity and grace.
Metasnark
I guess I should finally talk about Websnark. I’m not a big fan of Websnark; I think Mr. Burns’s writing is self-important and sometimes really pretentious. He writes about webcomics the way college sophomores talk about politics. There are things about his style and tone–neither of which ever really drops from the surface–that really rub me the wrong way. And some of what he does is exactly what Checkerboard Nightmare, my favorite webcomic, has been doing for four years. But not as bitingly funny.
That said, he’s not a bad writer, and he knows what he’s talking about. He’s also managed to do what nobody else has done, which is establish himself as a guy who just blogs about webcomics every day, and people like it. Other people have tried to fill that niche, but Websnark is the first to really get tacit approval from the webcomics community in general. And he did it by just writing what he knew, and writing a lot, and spelling stuff right and everything. That isn’t nothing.
So I read Websnark, because everybody else reads it (even Sumana!), and because I like to read things by people with whom I disagree.
Now, I write an anacrusis every day, and I dislike applying the term “blog” to everything that’s written on the Interweb, and anyway I still want to think of myself as a webcomic artist. For those reasons, I privately think of Anacrusis as my current webcomic, because it’s more like a webcomic than anything else.
Mr. Burns has expressed before his belief that a comic well written is superior to a comic well drawn–that, in fact, the art in a comic is irrelevant if the writing is good (see Dinosaur Comics). So I’ve been tempted to email him and ask him to write about Anacrusis before; what would he make of a webcomic without any pictures at all? But I never did, because I have an intense distaste for self-promotion, among other reasons.
Then today he linked to Pulp Decameron, a “microfiction experiment” that doesn’t really qualify as microfiction under any definition I’ve heard, but whatever. It’s pretty good, if uneven as any daily fiction exercise, and I guess I know now how Mr. Burns reacts to a webcomic without pictures.
Okay, I’m done talking about Websnark now.
I will probably get corrections on this
Theoretical problems in computer science are divided into classes based on their complexity. One class, called simply “P,” covers all problems requiring a yes-or-no answer that can be answered in polynomial time–which is to say that the amount of time needed to solve the problem is the result of substituting its input size for the variable in a polynomial equation. This is an important distinction, because that usually means it can be solved by a given deterministic computer (regardless of its speed) in some reasonable amount of time (ie before the universe ends).
There’s another class of problems, called “NP,” that has a special relationship with P. If a problem is in NP, there is no known algorithm for it that produces a solution in polynomial time–but the problem of verifying any given solution to the NP problem is in P. So you can figure out whether an answer is correct relatively quickly, but determining what the answer is could take a very long time. Longer than the sun has left in its life, for example, or longer than the universe has been in existence so far.
A final set of problems, called “NP-Complete,” is a special subset of NP. NP-Complete problems are very general and powerful–so general, in fact, that any NP problem can be transformed into an instance of any NP-Complete problem (and the transformation algorithm produces results in polynomial time). As you might imagine, these problems are very hard to solve, but of course their verification problems are in P.
If anybody ever produces an algorithm that will solve an NP-Complete problem in polynomial time, it will mean that all NP and NP-Complete problems are also solvable in polynomial time. NP and P will be equivalent sets. This would be a huge breakthrough in theoretical computer science, and it is likely that it will never happen.
But nobody’s proven that any NP-Complete problem isn’t in P, either. We only know that NP-Complete problems are not in P yet. (There’s a standing bounty on this; proof either way will get you a cool million bucks.)
As with most things that seem pointlessly theoretical at first, it’s not hard to apply the P-NP distinction to real life. It’s often easy to figure out that you’ve received an obfuscated message of some kind, whether it’s encrypted or noisified or divorced from its context. It may even be easy, given a possible meaning for the message, to decide whether that meaning applies. But deciphering the message from scratch can be very, very hard.
The difference between knowing that something is a message and knowing what the message means produces the best small mysteries.
Bus Ride Epiphany
Thinking about the Zappa quote from Leonard and the yesterday’s brilliant perspective-shift post at the iPAC blog brought me to a conclusion this morning, and I think it’s an important one. Just as printer manufacturers are actually in the business of selling toner cartridges, and just as FM radio and broadcast TV are in the business of selling your attention to advertisers, the record industry (like its tagalong, the movie industry) is not in the business of selling records. Their business has nothing to do with sales.
Think of the constituents of the RIAA as a group of investment brokers. Their customers are musicians, from whom they obtain capital in three forms: new music, the rights to that music, and promissory notes on the advances that constitute most of any musician’s pay.
You and I are the stocks in which they invest that capital, by means of advertising, radio and television play, and physical or electronic distribution. Even for the least successful major-label musicians, that investment typically yields a profit in the multi-hundred percentage range. For the most successful, it’s orders of magnitude greater–all the millions of $17.95s people pay for the big names.
Of that profit, the record company takes an eighty-nine percent commission.
Then it gives the remaining two bucks back to its investor, the artist–if it gives anything at all. Most of the time, the artist never even sees that two bucks, because it goes toward paying for the advance they got from the record company (more capital). You’re probably already familiar with this part of the story: it’s often years before the artist begins to see the royalty checks start to trickle in. Meanwhile, he or she is living off the advances with very little actual money to his or her name, and the record company is applying pressure to spend that money to create another, more lavish album (yet more capital).
This model actually helps me better understand the RIAA’s position on their thousands of lawsuits. They know that suing their customers is bad business, but they don’t believe they’re doing that: they’re suing us, the entities from whom they buy money with music, because it seems like we’re taking their capital and giving no return on investment.
Remember, when you “buy” a CD, you aren’t actually purchasing anything. You’re leasing from the record company the right to listen to a certain selection of music in a strictly specified manner of their choosing. The actual piece of plastic itself is basically a perk, with which you are not allowed to do as you please–you can make exactly one copy of it, which you can’t give to anyone else, and they’d rather you not be allowed to make that copy at all. They still want the rights of the lease to be attached to that piece of plastic, though. If you break it, they’re not going to send you a replacement, and you’re not allowed to download another copy of it from someone else (even though you still ought to have those listening rights).
In essence, they want contractual control over their capital after they’ve invested it, just as shareholders have to some degree. When they file lawsuits, they see themselves taking class action against negligent publicly-held corporations who spent their share prices in Bimini instead of running profitable businesses. They feel wronged, and justified for it.
I hope this makes clear how completely insane and backwards the music business model is. Forgive me, but I want to go over the big points again:
- The RIAA is a group of brokers with their pick of clients, most of whom are willing to do anything to be allowed to invest with them.
- They take capital from the investors whom they deem worthy, invest it, and reap huge profits.
- From those profits, they exact a commission of eighty-nine to a hundred percent.
- They’re well aware that their business model is incredibly shaky, and that they suddenly have a deadly competitor–the Internet–who is providing all their services, better than they can do so, for free.
- Just as monopolies have done again and again over the course of American history, they are trying to legislate and sue it out of existence.
This is why they have no qualms about suing grandmothers and Girl Scouts. This is why they are scared to death of Downhill Battle and everything it represents. They’ve already been pushed off the ledge, and bad law is the strawberry plant to which they’re clinging.
You probably already know that when you’re hanging from a strawberry plant with tigers above and tigers below, there’s only one thing to do: eat the strawberries. If the members of the RIAA were smart, they’d do so, by embracing and promoting voluntary collective licensing. But they’re scared, and fear makes people stupid.
It’s silly to assign agency to “the market,” to speak as if it were an active governor of what works and what doesn’t. But it’s useful, nonetheless, to think of it as a force that will eventually flatten any bad business model and replace it with a better one. This is what is happening with the record industry right now. This is why they’re going to fall, and we’re going to win.
Leonard says that it was in fact Zappa, and offers further quotage:
“In every language, the first word after ‘Mama!’ that every kid learns to say is ‘Mine!’ A system that doesn’t allow ownership, that doesn’t allow you to say ‘Mine!’ when you grow up, has — to put it mildly — a fatal design flaw.”
Maria notes that in fact it’s usually more like “no,” then “mine,” then “mama.” I think that only makes the quote more interesting, as does the fact that it relates not at all to free culture, and very well to the MPAA/RIAA model of purchasing and licensing. To quote Leonard himself, “‘own’ ‘it’ ‘on’ ‘DVD!'”
Update 12.09.2004 1615 hrs: Maria wishes me to state that though she has studied development, she is not in fact a developmental psychology student, and that I have never stated any facts about her or quoted her accurately, and also that I should be dragged out in the street and shot.
See? I did it again!
I forgot to mention that my Muse for yesterday’s anacrusis was fancy boy Cody Powell. I mean, moreso than usual.
Some things are fascinating to me that are boring to other people
Via Copyfight, an excellent article at Legal Affairs about Larry Lessig’s speech at Swarthmore. Okay, it’s not actually about that at all: it’s about the background of the whole jumbled movement, its ties to and distinctions from Marxism, and how and why these things are happening now. It’s an excellent primer on free culture, and I learned some things from it myself.
My favorite part, which I like because it’s so clearly and simply stated:
“If you give people the opportunity to create, they will do so, even without economic incentives. The core justification for intellectual property protection is that, without it, no one would have any reason to produce cultural, creative content. They would undertake a rational calculus and go off to become tax attorneys. But the dynamism of the open source movement shows that this fundamental justification doesn’t hold.”
I’m sorry, I just need to repeat that a couple times.
“If you give people the opportunity to create, they will do so, even without economic incentives.”
“If you give people the opportunity to create, they will do so.”
My brother had an AIM away message for a long time that was a quote from one of his professors, er, Woody Allen or Frank Zappa or somebody, like “Communism didn’t work because people like to own stuff.” I liked that quote, and I agree with it. I like owning, just for me, my computer and my backpack. I like owning a collection of nice felt-tip pens and original cartoon art. I like owning some ice cream.
But the best thing about reproducible art–text, comics, software or music–is that everybody with an appropriate container can own it at the same time. The infinite advantage of bits over atoms is that you can give them without giving them away.
Put another way, free culture works because people like to own stuff.