Category: Pulverbatch

The Law of Meta

September 27, 2006 /

To do meta well, you must first do well the thing within. Checkerboard Nightmare did metahumor and it worked, because Kris Straub was already a skilled humorist; by contrast, almost all webcomics attempt it within their first couple of weeks and fail, because their creators haven’t developed any skill at comedy. So you can see why I’m worried about Studio 60.

Not that Aaron Sorkin’s not a funny writer–with Mitch Hurwitz out, he’s the funniest writer on network television–but he’s not a sketch writer. Sketch comedy is hard, and even harder to do consistently. The best writers in the history of the format have had a hit rate of maybe one in five; even in the age of viral video, the only success Saturday Night Live has found on the intertube was a fluke that relied on hip name-dropping and the tired joke of white guys and gangsta poseury. And that’s out of what, three hundred skits a year? William Hung has a better batting average.

Even if Studio 60 focuses mostly on the weekly downtime and not the show proper, eventually it’s going to have to back up its premise that Matt Albie is good at his job. That means showing us a sketch at least every few episodes. Last night they went as far as showing us the cold open, and it was just a joke they made five minutes earlier repeated to music. It was a nice dramatic moment, with the orchestra and the bold statement of purpose. But it wasn’t funny the second time through, or the third, or the tenth.

A special case of the Law of Meta is the Law of Writing A Character Who is a Writer. The law is: don’t. Doing so almost invariably turns into massive self-indulgence and, worse, annoys me. Even Sports Night couldn’t escape that toward the end. And given that Studio 60 is already nicking from SN (homage to Felicity Huffman, fights with Standards and Practices, I understand next episode the power goes out), well, you understand why I’m worried again.

But I want to see the next episode now.

Story Fight!

September 20, 2006 /

Riposte!

Miranda sits at the table and turns the ring over and over. “You should have called me,” she says.

“Of course I called you.” He blinks and frowns. “I called you until your mailbox filled up. I called out the window and I called 911. I called, I–I called you names–“

“Please don’t take that tone,” she says.

“Why not?” he asks coldly. “It’s not as if I can make you upset.”

But Miranda loves him, loves him like chocolate and heat and really good pop songs. She can’t speak. She slaps the table and all the windows blow out.

And it’s a bit of an in-joke, but William’s allegory for my occasional struggles with syndication is unfairly rich.

Canonical first public mention of Dogpool

September 20, 2006 /

Dear my web developer friends: Hi. I’m building an AJAX application and I have some Javascript questions. Yes, if I were an earlier version of myself I’d stop reading now too.

The application is intended for use by small groups of people–say, two to ten–collaboratively, for a few hours at a time. There may be many small groups working simultaneously, but activity won’t overlap among groups, only among members of a given group.

Say Alice, Esha and Mallory are using the application, which means having the page open in a tab or window. Each of them has a panel on that page showing what the other two are up to. Alice has five heads-up tokens, and she flips two of them over; I want Esha and Mallory to see that her tokens now consist of three heads and two tails within a few seconds of her doing so. This should not require any activity on Esha’s or Mallory’s parts except having the application page open.

I’m building this with Javascript and PHP/MySQL, no Java applets or anything. Is there any way to accomplish what I want that doesn’t involve polling–that is, using setTimeOut(XMLHttpRequest(…)) to refresh the activity panels every five seconds? setTimeOut is nonblocking on the client side, but that’s a huge number of requests per time period and it scales horribly.

I’m considering the obvious optimizations (having the client side taper off in request frequency during periods of inactivity, and writing the activity data to static files so I don’t have to hit PHP and MySQL with every request). Like most optimizations, though, they don’t address the central problem of nonscalable methodology. Is there anything in Javascript that would let the client accept pings from the server side when the data updates? I don’t think there is, but I’m hoping I’m wrong.

This is called a business trip

September 11, 2006 /

Meanwhile, here I am in New York on September 11th, having flown up yesterday evening with a cadre of FDNY firefighters and a pilot who looked about ten. (Years old.) I nearly lost my luggage; my cabbie got lost. I’m on an expense account but I won’t get those reimbursements for two weeks, and this morning I walked eight blocks the wrong way. No idea when I’ll be allowed to leave work tonight.

It’s going okay!

You can tell it’s not canon because it’s in the past tense

September 6, 2006 /

Spurred by my threat to kill off Marlo and saved from the LJ feed, Ben bends Anacrusis to his will:

Suddenly Millicent started moving again!

“Awwwww” said Cosette, lovingly. She squeezed her sweet adorable fuzzy wuzzy kitten with marble eyes tightly. Millicent purred.

Rob cheered up!

Holly cheered up too!

South settled down!

The Chosen Ones remained awesome!

The Justin finally defeated The Man!

Everyone danced for the next fifty words!

August 25, 2006 /

Oh that’s better.

For the first time in years, I can link people to xorph dot com–just plain Xorph Dot Com–without feeling like I’m showing off my dirty underwear.

August 10, 2006 /

Three years after switching to NewsBruiser, I finally have NFD looking like I wanted it to look all this time but was too lazy to figure out the CSS. Me, not it.

I’ve been writing HTML for over ten years and CSS for over six, just because it wasn’t hard to learn and I could do fun stuff with it, and now I find myself in the position of the guy who makes a living off his hobby. Admittedly, so far this has been largely the tedious bits–like if I spent most of my day trying to shake a little broken flange out of an O-scale model train–but compared to my previous job of shaking out, say, crusty ketchup from a broken bottle, it’s aces.

Other people that write good

August 5, 2006 /

UJ wrote a fantastic response to my “Christ of the Barricades” challenge, and Will wrote a prequel to Beloit, saved here from the LJ feed:

Tarnished as it is, the dirty chrome armour of the Heliocrashers shines as they blast through the wall: Erythrophobia zaps at a guard, but canon says that sonoluminescence doesn’t cause bubble fusion. So she punches him through a wall.

The other ‘crashers are covering her while she sets a charge against the generator’s critical weak point when canon oozes out of a grate and tears Erythrophobia in half. The charge doesn’t detonate because canon says they use fusion to fly, not fight: instead, her top half flies into a duct and her suit’s failing containment does the job just as well.

And then there’s stuff like Sumana’s MC Masala, which… you know about MC Masala, right? And Leonard is getting the kind of rejection letters most of us would kill for, for a story you will (when you get to see it) kill to have come up with.

There’s no unifying characteristic between the amazing writers with whom I associate, no New School or Movement, even though I keep trying to assign one. I guess I’m just going to have to publish all you guys?

Baudrillard would actually get a kick out of this whole thing

July 26, 2006 /

The phrase “Christ of the Barricades” popped into my head this evening and won’t leave. I knew I didn’t invent it, but my usual sources for cultural context nearly failed me–Maria hadn’t heard it, nor had Wikipedia, and Google gave me only one result. That result led me to historian Frank Paul Bowman, who wrote a book in French called Le Christ des barricades in 1987. Yes, in French, and no, it doesn’t appear to be available in translation.

Putting the phrase in French and applying it to 1789-1848 (the book’s subtitle) certainly places it in context, but that only makes me want to read more. Unfortunately, I know from painful experience that academic texts with intriguing titles end up being, too often, boring and labored with odd extended rants about Disneyland. Also I don’t know French. So I’ll probably never read Le Christ des barricades.

But that’s what we have participatory media for, I suppose. What does “Christ of the Barricades” mean to you? In 101 words?