Yet Another Endorsement for Community

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Amazon had the first season of Community on sale for $12. Being a fan of the show, I immediately bought a copy, and as I revisit these episodes, I can't help feeling like I made a mistake in not buying half a dozen copies or more and giving them out as Christmas gifts. Not nearly enough people are watching this show, which could well be the best comedy on tv right now, and I have to say that, if you enjoy television at all, you really should be.

This is a show that is obviously loved by everybody involved in its creation (a trait it has in common with far too many shows that have been canceled before their time, including FX's recent Terriers). There is a joy surrounding it that is simply infectious, and that joy is enhanced by the fact that this is a show with a heart. The single camera sitcom is a genre that has long been shrouded in cynicism. Shows like Arrested Development, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and even, to an extent, 30 Rock, are essentially about flawed people hurting each other. When done well, this is still a funny format, but it wears on you after awhile. While I still adore it, I'm not sure how much longer Arrested Development could have lasted in the format.

Community takes a different direction. It's a show about flawed people overcoming and/or embracing their flaws to help one another. It's a show about how we find family in this crazy, mixed up world where traditional family is no longer a guarantee.

While that's the important part, it wouldn't be worthwhile if the execution wasn't spot-on, and the unique way that Community executes really helps elevate it. This is a show made by people with an abiding love of pop culture, and it is by no means afraid to make heavy use of tropes or references. The way Dan Harmon and the other writers use the tropes, though, is not as a crutch or even a scaffolding. Except in rare, highly intentional moments, they are used in a way that is incredibly organic and that contribute to the development of the characters. They use them in a way that shows the basis of these cliches in the reality of human interaction.

It's a wonderful and unimaginably difficult thing to do, and it wouldn't work if the writers didn't take the reality of the characters incredibly seriously. For all of the ridiculous things they might do or get caught up in, there are genuine people with genuine motivations in even the most ridiculous characters present, and that shines through most clearly in Abed.

Abed is a character who all but officially has Asperger's syndrome. He relates to people most easily through media cliches, which allows him an interesting role as a commentator on the action, providing a certain amount of meta-referential humor without actively breaking the fourth wall. If this was Abed's only role, he would still be a great character because of the singular way that Danny Pudi plays him, but he's far more than that. In episodes like Introduction to Film, Physical Education, Contemporary American Poultry, and especially last week's Mixology Certification, we can see just how troubled Abed is. Media cliches aren't a way for him to understand people. He can do that just fine. They're a way to help people understand him, something he can't do on his own. He struggles with his oddity and with being left outand he's willing to use people, to an extent, to feel like he belongs. He even recognizes that his own friends occasionally see him as something lesser, but he doesn't know how to express his frustration.

That's a lot of depth, and yet all of this is handled delicately. It's a testament to the collaborative effort on display, the willingness by everybody involved to let each other bring their gifts to the table and let the best possible result unfold. It manages to be touching without being saccharine, to be funny without being alienating, and to be fundamentally true despite being admittedly contrived.

Please watch Community. You'll be glad you did.

Final GRFP Essays

After I posted a draft of my personal statement for critiquing, a couple of people asked me if I would post the end results of my essays for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. I figured I would oblige, at least on the two important essays (the personal statement and the plan of research). My advisor was quite happy with both, though I'm fairly certain that the lack of references in the research plan will show how little I know about current research in the area and hurt my chances. In any case, here they are:

Personal Statement

As I begin the journey towards earning my PhD, I cannot help but be grateful that my undergraduate education took place at a small, liberal arts college. I may not have had all of the resources or opportunities to participate in original research that would have been available at a major university, but I was able to thoroughly integrate myself into a small, successful department in a way that would not have been possible in any other setting. For five years, I took every opportunity I could to leave my mark on Calvin College's Computer Science department. As president of the departmental student organization, I strove to foster community and engage my classmates in extra-curricular programming and service projects. As a lab assistant, I gained insight into the essential difficulties of programming while helping first-year students take their first steps into computational thinking. As a student grader for courses in Abstract Data Types, Programming Languages, Operating Systems, Software Engineering, and High Performance Computing, I developed an ever-deepening appreciation for the intricacies of our field.

Perhaps most importantly, I developed relationships with classmates and alumni who had entered the industry in every conceivable environment. From locally owned Agile software shops to corporate IT departments, from Google to MySpace to RIM to Microsoft, I was able to get a strong sense of what the world on the other side looked like. Reflecting on these conversations in the light of my own internship experiences, I quickly came to the realization that, while I could perform well there, industry is not the right fit for my personality. Whereas products are of limited appeal to me, novel problems can keep me captivated endlessly. Further, I could not escape the fact that many of the most fulfilling experiences of my undergraduate career came when working with students. The obvious route appeared to be a PhD and a career in academia. However, I had come to view programmers as “my people”, and I knew that I would not be satisfied if I felt that I was sequestered away in the mythical ivory tower. I concluded that I needed to do research with the potential to positively impact the lives of my friends in the workforce. To my understanding, there is no better path to this goal than working to improve the most fundamental tools at the disposal of every programmer: programming languages.

We live in a rapidly digitizing world, and while plenty of us have not yet bought into the smart-phone revolution, I cannot believe that the day is far off when every individual will benefit from being able to write simple applications for whatever personal computing device they carry with them. I doubt this will happen if people need to use Objective C or Java or even Python to do so. As much as these are improvements over assembly language and FORTRAN, most people simply aren't willing to endure the rigors that even modern high level languages demand. We need to further improve the expressiveness and of our programming languages if want programming to spread to the general populace. More worrisome is the simple truth that applications developed by such para-programmers are likely to be riddled with gaping security vulnerabilities and other errors. We need analysis tools that can identify these problems, explain them in comprehensible language, and even suggest fixes, and we need development tools that integrate utilities of this sort so that developers have all of this information at their fingertips.

While such improvements would certainly help professional programmers, they have their own set of needs that we must meet. As technology advances, software engineers must increasingly look to multi-processor computing to provide users with the performance and convenience improvements that they expect and deserve. If the task of programming in modern languages is too complicated for the general public, then the task of writing concurrent applications is even worse. The most prevalent constructs for concurrency remain threads and processes, machine-level notions that do not naturally lend themselves to the way we design algorithms or programs. We need to find new ways of representing concurrency that will ease the task of utilizing the power at our disposal. These tasks – the improvement of language design and analysis tools – fall squarely on the shoulders of Programming Languages researchers, and by taking them on, we assist in the efforts of all other practitioners of our discipline, be they hobby hackers, software engineers, or our fellow academics.

When the time came to decide where I wanted to pursue these goals, it was easy to choose the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU). For one thing, the Programming Languages group at CU gave me an opportunity to get in near the ground level with a young, energetic, and talented group of professors who are eager to advance the school's reputation in the field. This would not have been enough on its own, but when the time came for me to visit campus, Professor Evan Chang and others echoed my strongly held sentiments that programming languages research ought to be an interdisciplinary affair with a strong eye towards the tenets of Human Computer Interaction. After all, a tool that is difficult to use, no matter how great its functionality, is an inferior tool. Fortunately, CU also provides me the opportunity to work with respected researchers in HCI and cognitive science, including Professor Clayton Lewis, who found one of his first passions within academia in programming language comprehensibility. Considering these prospects, CU provides a near ideal environment in which to build the connections and lay down the foundational work to achieve my goals.

Ultimately, though, I do not believe that we enter academia simply to achieve our own research goals. I do not believe that we seek to make new discoveries simply in order to gain renown or satisfy our own curiosity. I believe whole-heartedly that we work to push the state of the art so that the next generation can push it even further. I believe that our work remains incomplete unless we prepare the next generation to pick up where we left off and provide them with the necessary resources to forge ahead. This, along with my professed love of working with students, is why I intend to return to the liberal arts when the time comes. Through its Graduate Teacher Program and participation in the GK-12 initiative, CU will provide me with ample opportunity to improve my pedagogy. By participating in these programs, I hope to learn how to design curricula that will mitigate my students' struggles while helping them gain an appreciation for both the art of programming and the principles that govern it. I also hope to bring with me a number of opportunities that are all too often lacking for liberal arts students working in the sciences. In particular, I hope to develop opportunities for research both within my own institution and especially in collaboration with my peers at other universities. I believe that building bridges between the liberal arts and and the world of research can only be of benefit to both.

There's a lot of work to be done before I get to that point, and that all starts with having the freedom to work on these problems. While my professors are excited by my ideas and eager to see me forward, we do not currently have funding for the particular work I hope to do, and this is ambitious work. As a student, I have time to do the necessary legwork and build the relationships that will get this work started. More importantly, I have the time to fail on the way towards progress without it impacting my career. I firmly believe that, with the guidance available to me here, I can make real progress and create opportunities for others to join in my work. I just need the opportunity, an opportunity the GRFP can provide.



_______________

Developing New Abstractions for Concurrency
Jonathan Walz

As we all know, in order to keep pace with Moore's Law and to continue providing consumers with the regular performance improvements to which they have grown accustomed, microprocessors have shifted to a multi-core model. While it was only a few short years ago that desktop computers were first adopting dual-core processors, we have now reached a point where six-core chips are being used in servers. Even low-power, ultra-portable devices like netbooks and tablets are seeing the upgrade to dual-core. It will not be long before even our simplest consumer devices have more than one independent processing unit on board. In order to take advantage of this multi-core architecture, developers need to write programs that propagate their computation across multiple processes and threads of execution.

Unfortunately, concurrent programming is fraught with difficulties, especially the sort of shared memory, thread based parallelism that multi-core systems utilize. Deadlock, race conditions, and other problems plague any programmer trying to properly utilize the power at their disposal, and while numerous libraries and frameworks exist to simplify the problem, they require programmers to fundamentally alter the way in which they develop applications. It seems reasonable to me, however, that these issues with thread-based parallelism all stem from a more fundamental problem with threading: it does not match up with our natural understanding of concurrent behavior. It is startling to me that, for all of our advances in high level languages designed to allow us to express programs more naturally and coherently, we still expect programmers to implement concurrency through constructs as fundamentally machine-level as threads and processes. If we want to evolve computing to the point where programmers can quickly and intuitively write concurrent applications that are both efficient and safe, we need to provide new abstractions for concurrency that operate in a manner that is intuitive to human understanding.

This edict requires us to first understand how it is that humans understand concurrency, a troublesome proposition. Think, for a moment, about the simple nature of human existence. Millions of distinct cells, each filled with dozens of organelles, independently send messages back and forth, coordinating their growth and operation in order to make up the tissues and organs that compose our bodies. These organs function in concert to keep us moving and breathing and thinking with nary a lock or semaphore in sight. We manipulate our bodies in response to multiple simultaneous stimuli so naturally that it is only when we start to consider how we are doing so that we falter. Concurrency is simply a fundamental feature of the natural world.

How, then, do we go about trying to understand how people think about concurrency in environments where it needs to be imposed rather than simply being? Fortunately, University of Colorado at Boulder professors Clayton Lewis and Michael Eisenberg have already taken an interest in this question. As a part of an Educational Game Design course taught by Dr. Lewis, several students have ventured to design games meant to help individuals think about concurrency. While results from these early iterations have been limited, there is hope that continuing efforts on this front will start to shed light on the topic.

Doctors Lewis and Eisenberg may be the only researchers at CU who are actively thinking about how we understand concurrency, but they are certainly not the only resource at my disposal. From traditional vanguards of numerical analysis and high performance computing to the emerging needs of software engineering researchers to Dr. Nikolaus Correl's work with robot swarms, concurrency is everywhere at CU. This will provide me a high level overview of how concurrency is viewed throughout the entire spectrum of the discipline and help me to see if there is any sort of unified model that can be applied.

Having access to this new level of expertise on the topic of concurrency has already allowed me to begin a much improved review of the literature on the subject compared to my earlier efforts. While I am only in the beginning phases of learning what has already been done, I am still feeling emboldened and hope to revisit my past research and expand on my efforts. I still believe that a message passing model for concurrency has great potential, but it has been stymied by the fact that we have needed to make the messaging explicit. When we work in Object Oriented programming, we already cause objects to send messages between one another. By utilizing shared memory access in new and well controlled ways, I firmly believe that we can remove or reduce the need for synchronization in these exchanges and gain concurrency and speedup as a result. Most important, such strategies could have a very limited impact on existing programming practices.

I will begin delving back into this topic with the same approach I took in my earlier research efforts: by using metaprogramming techniques to create this functionality in an existing language. Due to its numerous hook methods, reflectivity, and duck typing, Ruby remains an ideal candidate for this work. If I am successful in this endeavor, I hope to establish partnerships with researchers in other areas that use concurrency – especially Software Engineering – to test the usability and performance potential of such a system in real-world uses. If I see success in this area, I would like to continue on and begin work developing a language that natively supports this functionality or even try to add it directly to common runtime environments.

While I am engaged in this work, I also plan to participate in the GK-12 initiative where I can work with students who have had limited or no previous exposure to computing. This could be an ideal environment for gaining a better understanding of how people learn to think about concurrency as well as the best ways to teach it. Of those students who choose to pursue Computer Science as a profession, few will likely ever have to program a system with only a single processing unit. It is only fair that they be prepared for the tasks ahead of them.

The problem of how we understand and represent concurrency in computation is an increasingly important one. The more angles from which we can attack it, the better. I do not yet claim to be an expert on all of the research being done in the area, but the approach I suggest is not one that I or others with whom I have talked have heard of. It may not turn out to be the cure to our problems, but it is another point from which to start and from which to gather new information to help move us along in this new era of computing.

Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (pt. 1)

Last summer, I re-read and posted my thoughts on the seventh and final entry in the Harry Potter series. At the time, I mentioned that I had serious problems with a number of elements of the book, both in terms of content and in structure. I also noted that my love of the characters and the ultimate redemption of Snape ultimately made the experience worthwhile. It's safe to say that, by and large, the same holds of part 1 of the film adaptation.

Since I already said pretty much all I have to say on the content of the book, I'm going to take this space to focus on some issues unique to the movie.

First, as anybody familiar with both the books and the movies would expect, the creators had to do a bit of backpedaling in order to make certain elements work. Instead of simply cutting the wedding scene, we get a ridiculously half-assed introduction of Bill ("Hi, Harry, I'm Bill Weasely. I got attacked by a were-wolf and like my meat on the raw side now!" "Oh, nice to finally meet you, Bill").

More distracting, as you might expect, was the way that Dobby was forced back into things after having all of his involvement since Chamber of Secrets cut out. I know that Dobby's sacrifice is immensely moving in the books, but movie-watchers have no familiarity with Dobby's work at Hogwarts or his adventures with Winky or Hermione's creation of SPEW.

I'm not even going to try to describe all of the problems with the scene where Harry and Hermione dance in the tent.

The final problem is that the screenwriters obviously didn't put enough time into some of the dialogue. There were a few lines so clunky that the audience actually laughed. In some cases, it was simply because the characters needed to express thoughts or explain things that could not have been spoken by a human being in a way that didn't sound ridiculous. This is a relatively common problem with any fantasy setting, and in these instances, the writers did a decent job of hanging the lampshade* and creating intentional humor out of the situation. But there were other areas where they didn't seem to recognize the problems. Similarly, the way they shot Harry's interactions with "Bathilda Bagshot" evoked laughter at a number of times in what was supposed to be a tense scene.

The filmmakers did a number of things extremely right, though. For one thing, the death of Hedwig, while a bit abrupt, made far more sense in this setting. Instead of getting hit randomly by a killing curse while stuck in her cage, she swoops in and harasses a Death Eater who was trying to shoot Harry. Not only did it provide Voldemort a much more reasonable means of identifying Harry than "OMG, he used expeliarmus! It must be Potter", but it makes more sense, since there's no good reason that Harry wouldn't have let Hedwig fly freely and find him at The Barrows later.

Second, the infiltration of the Ministry was one of the most entertaining scenes in the series so far. The actors who got to play the Ministry officials into whom our heroes polymorphed must have had boatloads of fun. The physicality of their performances was just perfect. It turned what was kind of an awkward, tense scene in the books into a great tension alleviator, punctuated at points by signs of just how twisted the Ministry had become under Death Eater control.

Third, as much as a handful of critics complained about the camping scenes, I felt that they were handled quite well (with the exception of the aforementioned dance). The creators did a good job of displaying the impact of The Locket on people's temperaments and of Ron's growing insecurity with minimal time commitment. Hermione's almost run-in with the Snatchers seemed a bit purposeless beyond showing the potency of the charms they had set up, but I won't complain too much about that. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see much of how Ron's absence strained Harry and Hermione, but I won't hold that against them overmuch. Ron was only gone for 80 pages in the book (mostly spent at Godric's Hollow), and the impact of his departure is something that was almost entirely told and not shown.

Finally, the animation used for the Story of the Three Brothers was absolutely fantastic. I would buy a DVD just containing the various Tales of Beedle the Bard told in that fashion in a heartbeat.

So, not a great movie for a person who isn't particularly fond of the source material, but an enjoyable time for Harry Potter fans. I'll never be convinced that Deathly Hallows was the appropriate way to end the series, but David Yates and crew are showing that they're devoted to making the best adaptation they can.

Calling All Eyes (pt. 1)

I'm applying for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and the materials are due in two weeks minus a few hours. I feel like I'm finally approaching acceptable drafts of my essays, but plenty of proof-readers can't hurt. So, here's the current working draft of my personal statement with the research proposal and previous research to follow shortly. Any and all comments are encouraged, and please especially point out contractions. I write so conversationally that it's hard for me to weed them all out and I don't always catch them when I'm reading. The conclusion is also incomplete, so ideas there would be great (I hate writing conclusions). Thanks in advance and feel free to tell your friends:

__________________


As I look around at my peers taking their first steps towards earning a PhD, I cannot help but be grateful that my undergraduate education took place at a small, liberal arts college. I may not have had all of the resources or opportunities to participate in original research that would have been available at a major university, but I was able to thoroughly integrate myself into a small, successful department in a way that would not have been possible in any other setting. For five years, I took every opportunity I could to leave my mark on Calvin College's Computer Science department. As president of the departmental student organization, I strove to foster community and engage my classmates in extra-curricular programming and service projects. As a lab assistant, I gained insight into the essential difficulties of programming while helping first-year students as they took their first steps into computational thinking. As a student grader for courses in Abstract Data Types, Programming Languages, Operating Systems, Software Engineering, and High Performance Computing, I developed an ever deepening appreciation for the intricacies of our field.

Perhaps most importantly, I developed relationships with classmates and alumni who had entered the industry in every conceivable environment. From locally owned Agile software shops to IT departments at manufacturing and distribution plants, from Google to MySpace to RIM to Microsoft, I was able to get a strong sense of what the world on the other side looked like. Combined with my own internship experiences, I quickly came to the realization that, while I could perform well there, industry wasn't quite the right fit for me. Whereas products are of limited appeal to me, novel problems can keep me captivated endlessly. Further, I was surprised to realize, upon reflection, that the work I did with students were among the most fulfilling experiences of my life. The obvious route appeared to be a PhD and a career in academia, but I had come to view programmers as “my people”, and I knew that the only way I would be happy in the ivory tower was if I felt like I was doing work that would help them to be fruitful and multiply. To my understanding, there is no better path to this goal than working to improve the most fundamental tools at the disposal of every programming: programming languages.

We live in a rapidly digitizing world, and while plenty of us have not yet bought into the smart-phone revolution, I can't believe that the day is far off when every individual will benefit from being able to write simple applications for whatever personal computing device they carry with them. That isn't likely to happen if people need to use Objective C or Java or even Python to do so. Alternatively, if we do expect users to adapt to the demands of modern high level languages, we will need to provide better environments in which to program, environments that have a better understanding of the code and of the resources readily available for expanding or improving it. More worrisome is the simple truth that applications developed by such para-programmers are likely to be riddled with gaping errors and security vulnerabilities. We need tools that can identify these problems, explain the problem in comprehensible language, and even suggest fixes. While such improvements would certainly help professional programmers, they have their own set of needs that we must meet. As technology advances, software engineers must increasingly look to multi-processor computing to provide users with the performance and convenience improvements that they expect and deserve. Current abstractions for concurrency are fraught with difficulties and simply aren't sufficient to this task. These are all tasks that fall to Programming Languages researchers, and by taking them on, we assist in the efforts of all other practitioners of our discipline, be they hobby hackers, software engineers, or our fellow researchers.

When the time came to decide where I wanted to pursue these goals, it was easy to choose the University of Colorado at Boulder. For one thing, CU gave me an opportunity to get in near the ground level with a young, energetic, and talented group of professors who are eager to make a name for their lab. This would not have been enough on its own, but when the time came for me to visit campus, Professor Evan Chang and others echoed my strongly held sentiments that programming languages research ought to be done with a strong eye towards the tenets of Human Computer Interaction. After all, if we make a tool that is difficult to use, no matter how great its functionality, then we have made an inferior tool. Fortunately, CU also provides me the opportunity to work with respected researchers in HCI and cognitive science, including Professor Clayton Lewis, who found one of his first passions within academia in programming language comprehensibility. Considering these prospects, CU provides a near ideal environment in which to build the connections and lay down the foundational work to achieve my goals.

Ultimately, though, the purpose of academia is not just to achieve our own goals. We do not simply seek to make new advances and build new connections in order to gain renown or satisfy our own curiosity. We work to push the state of the art so that the next generation can push it even further. This work isn't complete if we don't prepare the next generation to pick up where we left off and provide them with the necessary resources to do so. This, along with my professed love of teaching, is why I hope to return to the liberal arts when the time comes. Ideally, my work and my particular view of Programming Languages will benefit my pedagogy. I hope to come to a more human understanding of computing so that I can better predict the obstacles my students will face and design curricula that will mitigate their struggles while helping them gain an appreciation for both the art of programming and the principles that govern it. Moreover, as my career in academia progresses, I hope not just to network with my colleagues but to build working relationships that will help me find the sorts of opportunities for my students that small colleges are too often lacking.

There's a lot of work to be done before I get to that point, and that all starts with having the freedom to work on these problems.

Dear Whore of a Bus Driver

I just thought I'd take a moment to let you know that, while most people might consider your snide commentary to me as I boarded your bus today to be rude and unnecessary, they were, in fact, perfectly valid. You see, it was entirely by my will that the stop light turned red, keeping you at my stop for an extra 45 seconds, and, furthermore, it was wholly by design that I stepped up in front of your door just as the light turned green once more. In this way, the good chance that allowed me to take an earlier bus than I ever intended was my fault and mine alone and I am more than deserving if your dry, biting ridicule.

I'm also amazed that, despite the facts that this is the first time we have ridden together and that I casually sauntered the entire way up to your door, you were somehow preternaturally aware that I "run every morning" to make a bus that I had only taken two other times over the whole of my life.

In conclusion, next time I start to board a bus and see that you are the driver, time permitting, I will turn my ass around and wait for somebody who isn't a total bitch.

-Jon

Dear MATLAB,

You know, for ages, I didn't think much of you. I'd heard the rumors and I knew some guys who *ahem* knew you. "MATLAB is quick and easy," they'd say. "She knows what you want from her and, if you ask her right, she won't make you play any games to get it." Maybe that's the sort of language some people like, but I was convinced you weren't for me. I didn't want any part of code that people like that thought worth talking about, but then this new position came along and I was told we'd be working together whether I liked it or not. My superiors just liked you too much.

After getting to know you this past week or so, though, I'll admit I see the draw. You're not as hideous or wrong as I first thought you to be, though those other guys have made you do some horrible things. You know your client base and what they like, that's for sure, and I'll admit...sometimes I like that kind of stuff, too. Your component-wise matrix operations satisfy me in a way that explicit iteration never has. You don't taunt me when I ask for help, and you're always ready with a suggestion about how I can better use your services.

Still, this new found respect doesn't mean we're anything more than temporary partners. You just don't have the spice that I need. You always want to do the same old things, and forget asking you to wrap your head around anything outside your domain. It just doesn't interest you. Well guess what, MATLAB, it interests me. Also, I just don't feel like I can depend on you. I know that's not a big concern for a lot of guys, but I don't have the slightest idea how you'll respond if and when something goes wrong. Will we be able to recover where we left off, or are you going to just quit on me? Our experience thus far makes me lean towards the latter, and that's just not okay.

I'm sorry, I know that I'm being hard on you, asking you to do things we were never meant to do together...I just need a break. Just for tonight. I'll see you tomorrow, I swear. I mean, we work together, right? It's not like I can hide from you.

You want to know where I'm going? Umm...that's really kind of embarrassing. Oh, alright, I'm going to go hang out with this other language I used to fool around with a bit, ALICE. She's kind of simple, but things were never serious between us, just a bit of fun. A change of pace, you know? Anyway, I promised some folks I'd introduce them to her later, so I want to catch up first and make sure she's ready for it.

-Jon

Brief Thoughts on The Social Network

Note, all commentary about individuals is about the fictionalized representations from the movie. I have no personal knowledge of any individual portrayed in the film.

From the point that I first heard that a movie was being made about the creation of Facebook, I was immensely skeptical. It didn't matter that it was written by Aaron Sorkin, perhaps the only person left in Hollywood who can successfully recapture the fast-talking magic of the '40's. It didn't matter that it was directed by David Fincher, the man behind Fight Club and other amazing movies. There was no way that a movie about something as inane and torn-from-the-headlines as Facebook could be good.

Well, it's a good thing that this isn't a movie about Facebook, then. I strongly agree with Linda Holmes over at NPR's fantastic pop culture blog Monkey See that it also isn't allegory about the changing face of social interactions, which is something old-timers will know all-too-well that I've written about before.

This also isn't a movie about how Facebook was somehow "stolen". I think it's interesting that the story is told through two different sets of litigation. The case being brought against him by the "Winklevi", the case that is really about the origins if Facebook, is somewhat more ambiguous in terms of whether or not Zuckerberg is at fault. However, the twins are depicted as such utter d-bags that it's hard not to look at Zuckerberg at being at least somewhat a victim. Admittedly, I'm no fan of the frequent absurdities of IP law, but it seems that the only leg they have to stand on is the way Zuckerberg actively avoided them after agreeing to take on the project. The idea is far too broad for them to have legitimate claim over and there is no reason to suspect that somebody as smart as Zuckerberg had cause to use or even to look at their existing code-base.

What The Social Network is, then, is a story about the other legal suit, a story about the inevitable results of poor communication and self-absorbed-ness. I'm not certain if Mark realized the way Sean was working to marginalize and eventually force out Eduardo. I do know that Mark cared more about the success of this thing he was creating and that it be his creation than he did about properly including his friend, who he thought might limit him. Zuckerberg's willingness to keep information from Eduardo and his unwillingness to seriously consider Eduardo's non-monetary contributions ultimately created the rift that was used to drive Eduardo out of the company and fuel his law-suit, whether that was what Zuckerberg ever had in mind or not (and I'm in the camp that isn't sure he did). The good or bad of this is left to the individual, and while the emotional portrayal leans towards siding with Eduardo, you can't deny the fact that Mark had a better fundamental understanding of what Facebook needed to be.

All of this is compounded by the general strangeness of Mark Zuckerberg -- something that friends who have met him claim is absolutely true. This is a man with an excellent grasp of people as a group and of the social drives that motivate us, but who is nearly incapable of understanding individuals or at least or effectively communicating that understanding. His bluntness and his distractedness are shocking. He wants to do well by people, but he's unwilling to share himself with them, unwilling to let them have a say in his vision, and he can't see why they would resent that.

One of the people I went to see the movie with posed an interesting question as we were getting back to the house: How many times do you think Zuckerberg has sent Erica a friend request? How would he respond if she accepted?

Boulder Update

The cool kids are writing "settling into grad school" blog posts, so I figure I might as well join the club:

The living situation is solid. Living with 5 other people isn't that different from living with 3, and when everybody has their own rooms, it's actually a lot easier. The guys are all fairly chill and I don't see too much potential for personality clashing, which is a huge relief. I don't have an abundance in common with anybody, but that's where my diverse knowledge and interest base pays off. I've had plenty of good times chilling and getting to know the roommates, either procrastinating around the house or out at the bars. I'm actually pretty excited that we've got a "regular" bar nearby in the form of Southern Sun Pub and Brewery, which is less than a 10 minute walk.

My only complaint lies in the kitchen. We've got too much stuff too poorly organized, and most of it is of pretty crappy quality. Trying to keep all of my tools straight and in a place where I can find it is an exercise in futility. Fortunately, I have a knife magnet now which houses a handful of tools that I need regularly, and I've had enough money to slowly pick up the few things we need (still need to get a couple of reasonably sized skillets, though). More irksome, for whatever reason, nobody seems particularly interested in eating what I'm making if they're being asked to chip in. It makes it hard to make not only more elaborate meals, but also simple things like soup unless I want to be eating it for days.

Boulder itself is pretty awesome. After a lifetime in the Midwest, dry heat is a wonder to behold. Being able to walk two miles in 90 degree weather and barely start to sweat is amazing. There's plenty to do in town, though my previous sciatica issues have made me hesitant to do a whole lot of hiking or any climbing, no matter how much the housemates want me to. The house is in a great location. Besides Southern Sun, we're also withing easy walking distance of both groceries (~.5 miles) and school (~2 miles) as well as several decent restaurants. We've also got nearby bus stops for the inevitable day when I can't walk to school.

Classes are good. I started out not particularly caring about Program Analysis, but the more I think about some of the work I'm interested in -- particularly abstractions for concurrency -- the more I realize how essential verification is going to be if I want people to take my research seriously. It will probably get rough once we get into project territory, but I'll be grateful for it down the road. User Centered Design started out slow but is getting more interesting. We're currently talking a lot about designing for accessibility to those with disabilities, which isn't anything I've thought about a lot before. The professor is also very interested in programming language comprehensibility and is excited to have a student in the class who wants to do some work in that area.

Research is less good. It turns out that my advisors and the group we're working with from CSU got their wires crossed when first discussing the project. When I came in, they thought we were going to be verifying policies for on-the-fly reconfiguration of smart power grids to ensure constant energy delivery and writing a DSL to describe these topology changes. It turns out that they just want us to optimize an algorithm for doing cost-benefit analysis on running feeder lines between sections of a smart grid. This isn't remotely in the realm of Programming Languages/Verification research, and it's not even kind of a year-long problem, but the first step is to do what they want from us. As a result, I'm banging my head against crazy statistical algorithms and MATLAB. This is just making me more convicted that I need to take some time to generate excitement about the work I want to do and possibly start up on reviving some of my old senior research project code.

Finally, I'm surprised by how grateful I've been for the InterVarsity Graduate Christian Fellowship group. Usually hearing the word "Evangelical" is enough to make me suspicious, but these are the sorts of evangelicals who would come to school some place like Boulder. I haven't had to deal with a lot of judgmental, conservative "personal relationship with Jesus" BS, which is a huge relief. My understanding of Christianity definitely differs from that of most of the other people, but it's good for me to be made to read and think about the Bible once or twice a week. It's also just a good social outlet. It's easy to call people up to go down to Pearl Street or just to sit and visit after small group on Wednesdays (which, fortunately, meets at our house). Last week we had about 20 people over for a game night that lasted a good seven hours (I highly recommend both Bang!, which is like a more elaborate Mafia, and Small World, which reminds me of a streamlined History of the World in many ways). Tonight I'm heading out to a Nepalese restaurant with some folks. Should be good times.

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty settled at this point and life is, as usual, mostly good. Glad to be where I am, even if I only have the slightest idea of where I'm going.

Scott Pilgrim

Sometime in March or April of 2008, I heard that Edgar Wright, of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead fame, was writing and directing a film adaptation of a comic series called Scott Pilgrim and that it would star Michael Cera. I love Edgar Wright, I love Michael Cera (note that this was just before Michael Cera fatigue swept a good portion the nation along with the backlash against Juno), so I immediately went and checked out the series and fell in love with it. I've eagerly anticipated each new volume (up to the final one, which released in July) and this movie ever since. I just recently finished re-reading the books and tonight I finally saw the film, so I figured it was about damn time I blogged about it.

The comics and the movie are really cut from the same cloth, so most of what I can say will apply to both, and the same can be said of the most common criticism: what's really at stake? By far the most common criticism of the movie was that it was hard to care about Scott and even harder to see why he was fighting for Ramona. That's a pretty legitimate complaint, until you take a closer look and see the point: None of this is about being in love. It's entirely about growing up. This relationship is just a catalyst, as they so often are.

Scott and Ramona are, quite frankly, the two least likable characters in this story. Scott is an idiot with no attention span, job, or prospects. He doesn't particularly care about anything and moves through life on a whim, unwittingly hurting people left and right, often times without even remembering how things went down. Ramona is slightly more responsible in that she at least has a job and her own apartment, but she's similarly capricious. The only difference is that she's fully aware of the hurt she's created and simply runs away from it any time it catches up.

Scott's battles with Ramona's exes simultaneously force him to fight for something for a change and make Ramona confront her own baggage and acknowledge that there are things and people in her life worth keeping around. Whether or not she's "the one" or Scott really loves her is hardly the question. The issue at hand is that both of them are realizing that we have to live in this world as it is, not as we'd prefer it to be. We can't live by mooching off our friends and wasting our time on idle fancies or by staying ahead of the inevitable changes. More importantly, we can't live our lives thinking we're the perfect hero of our story. We need to take charge of our affairs and of our faults and face the hard fact that reality is tough and being a good person in spite of that is tougher.

The book and the movie, which entered development and writing about halfway through the series, have different ways of letting Scott come to terms with these facts. In the movie, Wright has Scott acknowledge that he's fighting for himself and "earning the power of self-respect" when he confronts Gideon for the second time. This is slightly more straightforward and certainly happier than the comic's approach. In O'Malley's version, Scott encounters nega-Scott and he finally admits to himself what he's done and how many people he's hurt more than necessary by being willfully oblivious. Being the guilt-ridden penance junkie I am, I think I like this better, but both work well. In either case, Scott comes to terms with the fact that his life is his life, and he can't continue brushing it off if he wants it to turn around, and that's the important part.

So, that's my big reason for not caring a whole lot about whether Ramona appears to be worth fighting for. The other one is simply this: who are we to judge? As a rule, I've generally given up trying to figure out what it is that draws people to each other. We all have our own criteria, and it's hardly our place to judge. Most movies and books try to establish that people are right for one another with grand arm waving and a showiness that just doesn't happen in life. I prefer it when I'm allowed to just trust that these people are making the choice that they feel is best for them in their lives.

Not much else to say on the matter. The other big component is just the referential/stylistic component, which is the upfront draw. Both O'Malley and Wright have a near perfect understanding of homage and parody, and they keep the in-jokes coming at a blinding pace while keeping the bulk of the overt material readily accessible. Especially as a member of the in-group, I can't think of anything to complain about on this end.

Short version: Check out both the movie and the comics. They're not perfect, but you'll still be glad you did.

It's Not Too Late, George!

So, George Lucas has announced his plans for theBlu-Ray release of the Star Wars trilogy. It's just the '97 "Special Edition" versions of the movie released at a higher resolution. Now, this is disappointing to me because, as many of you know, I had a brilliant idea for this inevitable release a few months back. The short version is this: Create Your Own Edition.

Basically, provide a menu system that allows viewers to choose which version of the films they want to watch at any point where there is a difference between versions. Who shot first? Did Han meet Jabba in the docking bay at Mos Eisley? Did Alderaan's explosion look like special effects from the '70's or from the '90's? Was the destruction of the second Death Star celebrated by awesome, dancing Ewoks or by an interplanetary throwing down of Palpatine statues? (for the record: Han, No, '90's, and Yub Yub!).

Everybody has their own perfect version of Star Wars, so let them create it and share it (hell, give us a BD-Live feature that lets us watch our friends' cuts!). Seriously, this is an idea that would have satisfied *everybody* and made the release something really special instead of just another Lucas cash-in opportunity. I make no official claim to this idea, so feel free to spread it around in case it somehow makes its way to the fine folks at Lucasfilm before the planned Fall 2011 release.

Music for a 14 Hour Car Ride

Leave for Boulder tomorrow. Riding out their in a rented minivan with my parents. Since their taste in music is pretty different from mine, and since my dad vetoed audio-books for whatever reason, I took a lot longer than normal to pick out music for the trip and had to delve a bit into guilty pleasure territory. The final album list looks like this:

Beck: Sea Change
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy: Americana Deluxe
Bruce Springsteen: Ghost of Tom Joad
Derek and the Dominoes: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
Dessa: A Badly Broken Code*
Explosions in the Sky: All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone*
The Frames: For the Birds
Freezepop: Fancy Ultra Fresh
The Hush Sound: Like Vines
Jack Johnson: Brushfire Fairytales
Jimmy Buffet: Meet me in Margaritaville
The Killers: Hot Fuss
Nickel Creek: This Side
Nobuo Uematsu: Final Fantasy 6 Piano Collections
Reel Big Fish: Cheer Up
Sigur Ros: Agaetis Byrjun
TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain*
Weezer: The Blue Album
Wilco and Billy Bragg: Mermaid Avenue
Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts: Selections from the Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack


*Denotes music that will only be listened to if I'm driving.

Eclectic Update

I'm feeling really bored right now, so I'm going to pretend I'm a 14-year-old girl from 2004 and treat my blog like a diary for a night, just for shits and giggles. No single topic, just a bunch of loosely connected thoughts and facts about my life of late. If people actually like this, maybe I'll do it semi-regularly.

So, the Firefly stuff sort of imploded. Didn't realize how little I'd want to sit and watch TV, even Firefly, during the busier parts of my summer. I have not had a weekend to myself since June 11 and won't have one until just before classes start on the 23rd. I have either been elsewhere or had my grandparents in town or, in the case of this weekend, been packing any time a weekend rolled around for the last eight weeks. That might seem irrelevant during the summer, but when you consider the fact that my parents tend to forget that I am an adult and lay claim to most of my weekday evenings, it has added up to me having precious little time to enjoy this summer. In fact, the two best days I've had at home in my two and a half month stay were the two that I spent downtown on Jury duty. I got to explore and meet people and catch lawyers off guard and sit and read in peace. It was actually pretty awesome.

Speaking of reading, I've done a lot of that this summer. I mentioned that I finally got around to Pride and Prejudice in my (intentionally) somewhat controversial post on Mr. Darcy awhile back and wrote about my thoughts upon re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Beyond those two, I also read or re-read: Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere which, while not my favorite of his novels, is likely his most accessible; Boneshaker, a very solid first entry into Steampunk by Cherie Priest; Mossflower, easily my favorite of the Redwall series; and the first five books in Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series.

I wrote a little bit about the first book in this series and my thoughts on Fantasy as a whole when I started into it last summer. I'm happy to say that I have, by and large, quite enjoyed the books. They aren't without their faults. My biggest issue at first was that the first two books and more clung so closely to genre norms that I often saw Startling Revelations coming hundreds of pages in advance. During the third book, though, Butcher proves that all of the tropes were not a framework but mere scaffolding, and the series begins to move based on the considerable merits of its own setting and politics. More consistent problems, for me, include an occasional tendency towards the highly visual writing that makes Fantasy a difficult genre for me and Butcher's tendency to delve into unnecessary repetition of basic facts to make sure his audience is following along (how many times in a book do we need to be reminded of the importance of body language to the Canim?). By and large, though, Butcher keeps the pace flowing rapidly and the books are a solid read for fans, or lapsed fans, of Fantasy.

All of this reading got me to finally start working a little bit on a writing project I've been muddling over for years. Unfortunately I'm not talking about The Littlest Hobo, which tends to just make me go to very, very dark places. I've mostly got the loose details of a setting and a protagonist in place and am still trying to find the plot. I've got a couple of pages of establishing material written which I may post in the not too distant future. If anybody else would like to read about a "professional" medical test subject's experiences in a corporate dystopia, let me know.

I've been watching HIMYM with my mom lately (which is both weird and perfectly natural) and I've noticed that none of the characters beyond Barney, and, to a lesser extent, Robin, are terribly consistently defined in terms of personality. Ted can be perfectly charming and respectful in one episode and nearly as big a sleaze as Barney in the next; Marshall can't decide if he's the straigh-man or the goofball; and Lilly swaps between erudite and childlike at a whim. Honestly, though, I think that's part of why the series works and an important distinction between it and Friends, to which it will probably always be compared. None of us fills exactly one role in our social groups. We put on and take off hats as the situation demands it. It's nice to see characters who are similarly varied, even if the end result is sometimes more like season 5 and less like season 4.

Been cooking lots of Mexican/Tex-Mex lately. It's kind of like when I was first learning to cook and all I could really make was stir-fry and chili. My family was so blown away that they kept on asking me to make that same thing. Now I keep on getting talked into making tacos, guacamole, and salsa for people. As much as I love it, I'm hoping to move on to something new soon. Lots of ideas for soup recipes, especially ones that involve lentils and kale (though not together...yet). Here's hoping that the occasional weirdness of cooking at altitude won't kill that plan.

Not a lot of videogame action this summer. The same thing that killed the Firefly coverage killed that. Did finally cave in and pick up Jade Empire on Xbox Originals, though. I was...a bit disappointed. After reading IGN's 10.0 review, I was expecting something a little more. Part of the problem is that silent protagonists don't work as an emotional repository when the rest of the world talks. Bioware obviously realized this by the time they were making Mass Effect, and it's amazing how taking a certain amount of control away from the player -- giving the protagonist his/her own voice and words -- enhances attachment and even ownership. Bioware is apparently going a step further even in the Dragon Age sequel, allowing the user to select only the tone of the response, not even giving any sort of textual summary at the time of choosing. I'm excited to see how that will work out.

That's it, I guess. Hopefully everybody found something of interest.

Looking Back: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The first time I read the Harry Potter series, I pushed through all 7 books in 17 days. That included time spent packing, moving, and waiting to be in contact with people from whom I could secure the next volume. Once I finally finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, at the end of that marathon, I was exhausted and, admittedly, a bit depressed. It was hard to feel anything about the book in particular, other than the wonderful, dreadful knowledge that it was all done. As time passed, and I reflected on the final volume in particular, I had a few nagging issues with it, but I wasn't confident enough in my recall to make any formal complaints. Last summer, I had a bit to say while re-reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It was a good re-experiencing these books in a less hurried (or should I say harried*) way, and I've been waiting for the opportunity to do the same with The Deathly Hallows.

I'm now happy to say two things about this book. One, my complaints still stand; and two, they are still largely overshadowed by a handful of key moments.

I'll start with the complaints because, well, that's just the sort of man I am. For one, the entire arc of the book is just alien to the rest of the series. Much of that comes from the fact that Hogwarts isn't present to provide structure of classes and quiditch term breaks. Stranger, though, is that, in this volume, Harry starts out on a mission. In every other book, Harry heads to school just hoping to God for a normal year. We know that isn't going to happen, but we also get to see everything develop and come together slowly with a few peaks of action or character building thrown in. It's almost a mystery structure: Weird stuff going on...One of the professors is acting weirder than normal... OMG, Voldemort!

In Deathly Hallows it's...well, it's just OMG, Voldemort! The whole time. It's a bit overwhelming. It's also strange because it gives Harry sort of a list of mission objectives to complete.

Primary Objectives:
     1. Find horcruxes.
        1a. Find the locket
        1b. Find the cup
        1c. Find something related to Rowena Ravenclaw
        1d. Get the snake alone
     2. Figure out how to destroy horcruxes.
        2a. Recover the sword of Godric Gryffindor
        2b. Break into the Chamber of Secrets in unlikely fashion
            to retrieve Basilisk Fangs.
        2c. Learn that the dumb, fat, evil kids randomly learned
            how to cast a ridiculously potent fire spell.
Bonus Objective:
     3. Unite the Deathly Hallows.

To me, it just feels less like a narrative and more like a lot of checking off of lists. It doesn't help that Harry, Ron, and Hermione are barely escaping death everywhere they go. Leave for The Burrow, barely escape death. Go to a cafe in London, barely escape death. Go to the Ministry, barely escape death. Go to Godric's Hollow, barely escape death. Go to a random forest, barely escape death. Go visit Luna's dad, barely escape death. Get captured by Death Eaters, barely escape death. Go to Gringotts, barely escape death. Go to Hogwarts, barely escape death. That's nine times, off the top of my head, that the kids almost die! That's nine times more than in any other Harry Potter book! Obviously, this is a very dangerous trip!

As borderline awkward as all of this is, though, it's not nearly my biggest complaint. That would be reserved for the long list of material that I feel is almost entirely unnecessary. There's a lot of time spent on the life (and lies) of Albus Dumbledore in this book. Most of it is there to give a false sense that Harry might have serious doubts or turn his back on his mission. I never thought that would happen. The only other purpose it serves is to humanize Dumbledore a bit, but I really don't think that was needed. Adults will assume that his wisdom was hard-won, and kids can stand to have a blemish-less hero once in awhile. It's all interesting to a degree, but not nearly as much as it is distracting. If Rowling can go on ahead and tell us what characters' lives are like in between the main ending and the epilogue through unofficial channels, she can do the same with Dumbledore's home life.

I also fail to see the point of removing Ron for a whole 80 pages of story. I suppose it serves to slap us in the face with the continued mutuality of Hermione's feelings and of his role in the group beyond comic relief, but it just seemed cheap to have him gone for one small vignette and suddenly back.

My biggest problem, however, remains with the eponymous Deathly Hallows and the half-assed introduction of wand lore. I really don't see how the Deathly Hallows were in any way necessary. The Resurrection Stone gave us a nice scene with Harry walking to his demise, I suppose, but it did nothing for the Cloak, and the nature of the Elder Wand then gets all mired up in the BS wand lore stuff. I would have much preferred they stick to the, "Hey, I died for everybody. You can't do any harm to anybody anymore. Suck it!" approach to the ending. Instead, they conflate it with the "Your wand is now mine by way of Draco's actions" Deus Ex Machina by which Harry doesn't even have to be the one to fire the killing curse at Voldy. If that was really the whole reason for all of that wand bull -- pretending that Harry never killed anybody (he did, think of why he didn't stun Stan Shunpike, and then the fact that he did the same to others on his trail) -- then it's just, well, dumb. I'll also note that, when push came to shove, none of the "good guys" were terribly opposed to using any of the "unforgivable curses". The readiness with which Harry uttered his first "imperius" always rubbed me the wrong way.

All said and done, though; as much as the various points above irritate me, it's still a more than adequate ending. Why? Because Harry experiencing Snape's memories is the most important chapter in the entire series. Because Rowling still knows these characters. Because I never actually wanted to stop reading, either time through the book. I meant to take four or five days to cover Deathly Hallows on this outing. I couldn't last longer than two, and I really tried.


*I really ought to be shot

About Me

Lately, I've been writing people from all across the Internets, notably those who are physically located in Boulder, CO, about considering me as a roommate. Since I am stuck on the Internets, unable to manifest myself in Boulder to meet people or see properties, I have been getting a lot of practice introducing and describing myself to people. This afternoon, I had the opportunity to write the longest such explanation yet while starting correspondence with a group of five guys from I've never met before whom I was put in touch with through InterVarsity and who might be willing to let me rent a house with them. I'm not even remotely enthused by the possibility right now, but I've got to take what I can get. At the very least, I think the email introduction a pretty good one -- at the very least, it's thorough (most are much, much more brief). Let's see how many of you agree and what you think I left out:

"...
Mostly, though, I'd like to know a bit more about all of you along with how and how well you know each other. I can get along with just about anybody, but I'm very much an introvert and it can take me awhile to figure out where I fit into established group dynamics and to feel comfortable. Living with 5 guys I don't know from Adam who I don't readily identify with and who are already pretty close could easily result in me semi-consciously cutting myself off. I don't particularly feel like doing that to myself or to you.

I can start by sharing a bit (or perhaps a lot) about myself: I'm an incoming PhD student in Computer Science. I don't fit super well into whatever stereotype that may cause you to imagine, but I am definitely a bit of a nerd. I like boardgames and videogames, I use Linux, I read and (usually) get xkcd , and I'm pretty willing to get excited and engage in debate about relatively meaningless things so long as nobody is being terribly serious about it. I even minored in Japanese. However, I don't obsess over anime, comic books, or RPGs (except occasionally Mass Effect and Chrono Trigger <_<); I get along perfectly well with people who aren't huge nerds; and I even enjoy watching and occasionally playing sports (especially my Twins and Vikings).

I really like music. If Calvin College, where I did my undergrad, had a better program, I would have pursued a double major with it. I sing and play saxophone pretty well and hope to do a bit of both at whatever church I wind up attending. A lot of what I listen to for pleasure is relatively indie (TV on the Radio, DeVotchKa, Explosions in the Sky), but I also love Jazz (Coltrane, Stan Getz), classic rock (Zeppelin, The Who), "classical" (Brahms, Mozart, Stravinsky) and even good pop music on occasion (The Killers, old Weezer). I will never proclaim that I hate an entire genre of music, as so many people do with hip-hop and/or country, even if I'm not terribly fond of the most prominent examples of those genres, as is the case with hip-hop and country. As a result of hanging out with a lot of media production people, I'm also really into movies and relish hanging out and binging on TV on DVD. My collection isn't huge, but I like to think it's of pretty good quality. If you have an appreciation for Arrested Development, Pushing Daises, Freaks and Geeks, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer...we'll probably get along.

In terms of things that more directly impact living arrangements, I have a fellowship, so paying my share of rent and utils should never be a problem. I sometimes let my own room get cluttered with laundry or papers, but I'm pretty good at keeping common areas clean so long as other people make an attempt to do so as well. If you're a bunch of slobs, I'll probably join right along out of spite. I like to cook, and I'm very happy to cook for others so long as they cover their share of the cost. I'm not terribly fond of passive-aggressive behavior, as I tend to respond in kind, which isn't something I like doing. I much prefer that issues be addressed directly and considerately. I'm usually pretty good at acknowledging when I'm in the wrong, and it takes a hell of a lot to make me hold a grudge. About the only thing you can do that will immediately give rise to dislike from me is display intolerance towards another person's race, sexuality, politics, religion, or whatever else (for the record, I am a white, heterosexual, liberal Christian).

I don't mind having people over, and would like to have people over myself for pot-lucks or grill outs or just to hang out. I don't want to live in a huge party house, though, and I tend to revert to people watching in crowds of larger than 10-15, which weirds some people out. I don't drink or smoke and would rather not live with smokers (certainly no 420), but I don't have any problem with others drinking so long as no one person is getting absolutely trashed five nights a week.

Finally, as long as you seem to know one another at least in part through InterVarsity, I may as well also comment that I'm Catholic. Not a "The Pope is always right and Protestants are heathens" Catholic, but an "I appreciate the bulk of the theology, love the level of social activism, and semi-reluctantly understand the value of the hierarchy and thus see no real cause to leave the Church" Catholic. I thoroughly enjoy discussing theology academically, but I'm not huge into talking about my faith or my "walk with Jesus". I can explain in a couple of easy sentences why I'm a Christian if I'm asked, and that's about the deepest I like to go on the subject under all but the most extreme of circumstances.
..."

huh? huh?

Fickleness and Fidelity

I used a car ride home the last couple of days as an excuse to read Pride and Prejudice. For years, I've been meaning to read this classic novel, and I'll admit that my curiosity has only been piqued by the abundance of women I know who have declared their undying love for Mr. Darcy. There's little I can say that hasn't been said about the book itself. Austen is rightly celebrated for her dialog, as it brings her characters, particularly the supporting cast, to life brilliantly. Indeed, without it, the novel would mostly be flat. But it is there, so all is splendid. Tangentially, I could complain about particulars of Regency Era grammar: The awkward, unrestrained use of commas; an abuse of semicolons that puts my own to shame; and the freedom with which pronouns are used without any attempt to establish a clear antecedent...but I imagine that these aren't issues particular to Austen, and the joys far outshine the frustrations.

Since I can't really say anything that hasn't been said already about the novel as a whole, I want to focus on one tangential aspect which I already mentioned: Mr. Darcy and his seemingly universal adoration. Now, I know that I'll draw a lot of flack for this from any lady readers I may have, but I just want to say this:

Dear Darcy Devotees,

shame on you

I say this because, in many respects, there is little remarkable in Darcy. Certainly, he is generous and intelligent and believably flawed, and he goes to great lengths to provide for Lizzy's happiness; but the same can be said of any number of well written romantic leads.

If you are interested in the particulars of his character at the end of the novel, then he is simply what I would call an extended introvert. That is to say, an introvert who has realized the importance of putting on an approachable air, of reaching out to others instead of expecting them to tolerate you in the expectation that you are ultimately worth getting to know. This is a fine sort of person in my mind, but people in general still don't take too kindly to introverts. Even those who have learned to deal perfectly well with polite company and new relations rarely radiate any sort of approachability, and just as infrequently are they any good at doing the approaching. This just weirds most people out, including plenty women I know who still claim to adore Darcy.

So, it clearly isn't Darcy himself that is so much more widely loved than any other male romantic lead in literary history. This leaves us with just a handful of means of explaining the ardor so many claim to hold for him, and none of them are particularly flattering. The first two reasons are Darcy's wealth and appearance. Neither of these seem particularly likely, though. We are reminded regularly of both, but neither is an essential part of his character or a particular reason for Lizzy's love for him (even if both are contributing factors). Since it is obvious why loving Darcy for either of these reasons would be disagreeable, and since it is also a highly unlikely case that it is so, we will abandon the entire possibility.

What's left, then, is to love Darcy for his (apparent) changeability. I say this because it is Elizabeth's rebuke that leads him to see the limitations of his ways and to begin to work on his seemingly haughty tendencies. It is the way he changes as a response to his unrequited love that causes Elizabeth to eventually change her opinion of him. It could seem, therefore, that Darcy is changing for Elizabeth. I ought not need to explain how this ties in with popular cliches (the tamable bad boy) or why it's a terrible reason for being into a guy (thousands of bad, even abusive, relationships). The big problem, however, is that it's clearly a misreading.

From everything we are told from the start by those close to him, Darcy has always, at heart, been a warm and generous man. It is just that his warmth and generosity are, at first, only shared with those in whose company he is comfortable. His apparent haughtiness is, likely as not, a byproduct of a combination of natural shyness and introversion (much like his sister's) and a firm understanding of his breeding and capacities. Darcy has seemingly been told from birth that, while anybody is worthy of his charity, only certain people are worthy of his knowing -- and most of these people will want to know him well enough that they will tolerate his aloofness and mild snobbery. He sees no cause to think otherwise until he meets Elizabeth. It is important to note that he does not change for her, as suggested above. It is not a desire merely to please Elizabeth that causes him to warm to those he may have previously thought beneath his station. No, Darcy opens up because of Elizabeth. She incites in him an awareness of the value of all people, an understanding that being a gentleman does not simply mean extending basic courtesies, but extending oneself to all.

So, it really makes very little sense for you to be in love with Darcy. Darcy will not change to be what you want him to be. He will become the man he was always meant to be; and that is a man you might admire, but probably wouldn't be terribly comfortable with. It makes perfect sense to rejoice in Darcy and Elizabeth's happiness and in the unexpected felicity they find. It makes perfect sense to celebrate Darcy's goodness and generosity in acknowledging his mistakes and working to amend for them for the sake of Elizabeth's happiness. However, what makes no sense is to be in love with Darcy. Those qualities which have been mentioned as universally laudable are hardly unique to him. Personal experience tells me that precious few of you are willing to tolerate introversion and apparent pride to the degree Darcy shows it long enough to gain the intimacy to see beyond it. And if your chief desire is to love a man who loves you as totally as Darcy does Elizabeth, well, you're barking up the wrong tree for an abundance of obvious reasons.

As for those of you who haven't read Pride and Prejudice: do. It's good for you.

Thinking Critically About Firefly: Bushwhacked (Episode 4)

I've said in each of my last posts that I'm not overly fond of this episode, which is why it's taken me so long to get to it (in fact, Sepinwall beat me to the punch on this one =/). Unfortunately, now that I have time and nothing better to do, my laptop doesn't want to read the disc, so I'm doing this from memory. So, instead of walking through specific moments in the episode, I'm going to briefly explain why, this episode ranks so low on my list.

Fortunately, my problems don't have much to do with the episode itself. It's a tightly paced episode that provides a solid introduction to the mentality of the series bogeymen and what makes them so scary all the while keeping them shrouded in horrific mystery. It provides some great humor moments to ease this tension, as well (Wosh and Jayne's interrogations) and also finishes the job of re-establishing characters who didn't really get their moments in The Train Job (Kaylee's unstoppable cheerfulness; Simon's insulated naivety). Finally, as Sepinwall noted, in showing even straight-laced Alliance troops breaking from protocol, it also continues the work of establishing the show as a Space Western (I briefly touched on what this means to me in my old Cowboy Bebop post and may devote a brief entry specifically to this concept in the near future).

Honestly, in terms of raw production, Bushwhacked is a pretty great episode. Why don't I like it, then? Well, partially because I'm not a fan of gruesomeness. I dread Mal's discovery of the passengers on the ship and the survivor's breakout from the Alliance infirmary every time I watch this episode. Mostly, though, my complaints are a posteriori and result from a lack of satisfaction with the ultimate use of Reavers in Serenity, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, feel free to celebrate the fact that Bushwhacked is a pretty solid episode that normal people, free of my squeamishness an pickiness, probably like quite a bit.

Coming up next, possibly even starting tonight, is disc 2. Disc 2 of Firefly is about my favorite thing ever. After realizing that three of its four episodes are probably the best of the series' more light-hearted outings, it became a defining element of the Pity Party as a proper noun*. While the remaining episode, Safe, isn't particularly strong, it contains at least two Important Revelations. Thinking about Shindig right now, I'm already pretty stoked for everything coming up.



*The Pity Party is defined as a get together with friends, all or most of whom have been having a pretty crappy time of things. Its purpose is to help people feel less like shit by bitching about their current problems, eating chili, and watching the awesomeness that is Disc 2 of Firefly. So far, five out of five Pity Parties have been remarkably effective in improving outlook.

Cyclic Arguments for Atheism

Several years ago, a non-Christian friend asked me how I accounted for people, even people before Jesus, espousing many of the same ideologies preached in the Gospel. Unfortunately, most of his other Christian friends were, let's say ill informed and over-zealous*, and had previously told him that such men were sent by Satan to give us cause to doubt the origins of Jesus' message. Understandably, this wasn't terribly palatable to him. My answer on the other hand, which was sufficient for most of the people in the room, basically boiled down to Common Grace and Jesus being the Eternal Word. The friend who posed the question, not wanting to appear beaten, responded by saying, "But I don't believe that." Amazingly enough, that's a pretty generic example of a pretty dumb strategy I've seen a lot lately across the interwebs when those hostile to religion feel the need to try and challenge religious individuals with the intent of embarrassment. As such, I thought I'd address it quickly.

Attention, atheists: I know plenty of you, I generally understand your reasons for not believing, and I think most of you are perfectly swell folks irregardless. But, when you're debating the relative merits of theism, or asking how people of faith respond to apparent paradoxes or more general quandaries, you've got to remember that you're going to get a theological answer rather than a practical one nine times out of ten. After all, if there were a clear, practical answer, you wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. Moreover, the challenge was never to somehow "solve" the problem for you -- a rigged game if ever there was one. It was to explain how a person of faith can justify continued belief in spite of it.

So, while I welcome you to go on ahead and challenge the answer given, whether you're questioning its theological basis or its ability to adequately resolve the issue; asserting that said answer is invalid because of its nature and resultantly claiming some sort of victory for yourself just makes you look like an ass. It's what happened to my friend when I simply retorted with, "but I do," and he got laughed at so hard that he briefly left the room; and it will happen to you if your "opponent" is even mildly competent.**

Thank you, and goodnight.


Also, for those interested, this was brought on by this tweet and my consideration of how poorly the man who wrote it would likely respond to an answer revolving around doctrines of Inspiration and The Trinity in light of earlier boasting about his atheism -- always a bad sign.



*In this case, Youth Group leaders at the local Evangelical Free Church. Sorry to the EV Free people in the audience, but this sort of experience is why I'm generally skeptical of your churches.

**and if they aren't competent, you haven't accomplished anything anyway, so shut your damned trap. ;)

Thinking Critically About Firefly: The Train Job (Episode 3)

Those of you who are long-time Firefly fans likely know that The Train Job was ordered as a replacement for the pilot episode, which Fox execs loved but, for some reason, didn't love enough to actually air until after they'd decided to cancel the series. As such, it does a lot to briefly and strongly re-introduce our heroes and highlight their pasts and relationships. Fortunately, Whedon and company care enough about and understand these characters well enough that they manage to pull it off fairly organically with a relatively fun adventure, but it does mean that we don't learn a whole lot knew about anybody and no real growth occurs.

The bar scene that the episode starts with is a great example. In the first five minutes or so, we get crystal clear characterizations of much of the crew, from Mal's wit to Jayne's surliness. We're reminded about Mal's history with The Independents, River's time in the "academy", Zoe and Wosh's marriage, and the less-than-legal means by which the crew makes its living. We're even reminded of the show's namesake -- the classification of the ship that is the crew's haven against meddling governments. None of this is terribly atypical for a second-episode recap-wise, but we clearly saw in Serenity that there's more to these characters, especially Mal, than this; and we need to be shown all of that again.

This is why the episode suffers, at least in comparison to the rest of the series. It has its share of other flaws, of course. The way the eponymous train job goes down is questionable at best; and I've rarely watched this episode with somebody new to the series without them commenting on the ridiculousness of Niska's accent. But the biggest problems all come from needing to reintroduce the characters and settings in a single hour without covering too much old ground. Beyond the stagnation aspect already mentioned, it results in some heavy-handed dialog, and I'd even call the melodrama of the dilemma Mal finds himself in a consequence of this fact; as it allows him to show his true colors as a good guy in an episode where we see the depths to which he's willing to go to stay floating.

But, when all is said and done, it's still Firefly, and it's still largely brilliant. From Mal distracting the man in the bar at the beginning to drugged up Jayne, it keeps the series' heart alive; and Mal kicking Crow into the engine is just as effective as his shooting of Dobson in Serenity. We even do get the teensiest bit of advancement with the introduction Hands of Blue. As such, there are far less pleasant ways to spend 45 minutes of your time.

Hopefully this was a bit easier to get through than the beast that was my coverage of Serenity. I'm thinking it's a bit too terse, but I figure virtually anybody reading this has seen the episodes, so an elaborate recap isn't really required. Besides, I want to save my energy for episodes that I really like. We've got Bushwhacked in the way first, though, which may be my least favorite episode. In any case, we'll get to that and why in the near-future (possibly yet tonight!).

And, once again, if you want to see professional commentary on the series, check out Alan Sepinwall's awesome blog on Hitfix. His thoughts on Serenity can be found here, and his post on this very episode will be up tomorrow.

Videogames Storytelling and the Problem with Plot Twists

This has been brewing for awhile, but I'm still not quite sure how to say anything on the topic coherently. Let me start by saying I don't require the games I play to be narrative driven. I've sunk more time than I care to think about into Borderlands since it came out last October, and the biggest drive in that game is to gain levels and pick up loot. It's good clean fun built around the random positive reenforcement that we love so much. When games do try and compel progression through narrative, though, I like that narrative to be able to stand on its own merits, preferably with writing that doesn't make me cringe. Unfortunately, this seems to be too tall an order for many game creators. This is largely because videogame writers don't seem to know terribly well how to handle what I will generically call "twists" for now -- i.e. those plot elements that shift the immediate focus of the action or the meaning of those actions that have already occurred.

Prime example: towards the end of April, I picked up Assassin's Creed 2 -- nearly universally lauded as one of the best games of 2009 -- on the cheap and started playing through it. The first half of the game is quite enjoyable. I didn't even mind the "ancestral memory" conceit used to link the games in the series. The story (technically the story-within-the-story, but the main plot for all intents and purposes) is a simple but relatively compelling one of revenge against those who have unjustly wronged your family. It felt good saving the city of Florence from these corrupt men. Moving on from there, things start to get a little bit less enjoyable plot-wise as you move on to unravel the larger conspiracy that said men were pawns in, but the city of Venice is even more fun to explore than Florence, so it works out alright for the most part. All the while, there are opportunities to unlock secrets about the larger story surrounding the game -- the historical and modern activities of the Assassins (proper noun) and the Templars in which Ezio, the effective protagonist, is not a part.

This background information is generally pretty ridiculous. It involves elaborate plots and partnerships, not to mention ancient aliens (and alien-human hybrids!). One of the major failings is an attempt to assign roles in this conflict, particularly among the Templar, to far too many historical figures. If a historical figure has ever been vilified in any medium, whether it's Hitler or Edison, they were secretly a Templar. Anybody whom the game creators thought was a Pretty Cool Dude, be it Dante or Tesla or Machiavelli, was secretly a friend of the Assassins. It's unnecessary, distracting, and ridiculous; but it's also entirely optional and thus tolerable...until the last hour or so of the game.

Suddenly, in a major "twist", the alien relics show up within the main plot of the game. And then you have to kill the (evil, Templar-colluding) Pope, who bears another of these relics. And then you find a message recorded and left by the super-powerful-but-now-extinct aliens (whom ancient man thought to be gods) about how the sun is going to blow up someday, so screw your petty conflicts. It's ridiculous, it comes out of nowhere, and it leaves you saying, just like it does the sub-protagonist, "What the ****!?". I have no use for twists of this sort in any sort of story. If it doesn't make sense within the context of what we've been told or shown. If there have been no details to suggest that something is happening other than what we've been led to believe. If the mechanism that instigates the revelation requires supernatural origins. If the entire point is to cause surprise or speculation rather than concern or curiosity...leave it be.

Unfortunately, this is mighty common in videogames, including those that have story as a primary component and not just a generic motivator. I've been slowly working my way through Tales of Vesperia the last several months; and I can't help dropping it for awhile every few weeks because of the absurdity of its plot. The character interactions are mostly pretty great, and the first large story arc -- setting out to retrieve a stolen artifact necessary for the survival of your hometown -- is, again, straightforward and effective, even if I ran into plenty of problems with annoyingly "creative" words made up for the game (as always, xkcd proves right). After that first arc concluded, though, I realized that they were intentionally keeping everything about the workings of the setting as nebulously defined as possible so that they could make up as much crap as they wanted to to prolong the story. Pretty much every single major shift in the plot for the last 20-30 hours has begun/ended with the "genius mage" character going "oh snap! these magical crystal thingamabobs we've all relied on for basic survival for centuries are reacting in some weird way that nobody has ever documented before or thought to be a remote possibility! But now that I've observed it once I understand it completely and can say conclusively that we need to go do X next!" Either that, or some ancient, wizened creature says "puny mortals. you cannot comprehend what's really happening...unless you go do Z, in which case, yeah, you can comprehend it just fine. So...yeah, go do Z." It's ridiculous and makes it legitimately hard to play the game at times.

Even games from the same series or writer can use plot twists exceedingly well in one entry an quite poorly in the next. I complain about its popularity a lot, but Final Fantasy VII is a great game that has a handful of twists, all of which work. None of them seem too far-fetched (even if at least one is borderline traumatic in its surprise), and all work to make the eventual revelation about Cloud's real past and his relationship with Sephiroth make sense. Final Fantasy IX, on the other hand, doesn't handle its twists nearly so well. Whether it's Zidane's origin or the final boss, once you get past the second disk, the big twists all come out of thin air. Hell, as much as I love it, Mass Effect 2 even slips a little bit with the final encounter. I'm willing to overlook that as it makes a certain (if small) amount of sense based on what we know at that point, not to mention the fact that nobody makes any real claim to understanding beyond conjecture what was happening.

That really touches on the key thing. If a twist happens after it has been telegraphed, whether it's through subtle hints that take on greater meaning after the event or more obvious foreshadowing, that's good use of a twist. If a twist happens and there is no prior evidence to explain what happened or to make us think that such an event might happen, but the next portion of the plot is (at least in part) dedicated to illuminating the twist -- to seeing the characters come to understand why their world has suddenly changed and what that means, then that's a good use of the twist. However, if a twist occurs out of nowhere and somebody, instead, immediately comprehends the significance and cause of the event based entirely on knowledge which the audience didn't even know might exist, that's poor use of a twist.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't something that just happens in videogames. I'm still upset with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for this sort of sloppy story telling. It just seems to be more readily accepted in videogames, and it shouldn't be. People have been using games to tell legitimate stories for 20 years or more now. We shouldn't allow the overly-frilly drivel that passes for plot in most of our games today. I'm not demanding narratives that are going to blow my mind. I'm not even demanding narratives that are universally complex and multi-faceted. I'm asking for one simple thing: If you're not willing to take the time to make sure everything makes sense, keep it simple. Moreover, realize that if the characters are ever spending less time in a state of shock or confusion than the audience, you're probably doing something wrong.

Porco Rosso is Beyond Pleasant

Like most self-respecting human beings, I have an abiding love for the bulk of Miyazaki's films. So, when Ponyo came out stateside last summer and Rotten Tomatoes was running a countdown of his ten highest rated films, I was shocked to see that one of the top movies was one I'd never heard of: Porco Rosso. A month or so later, when I was signing up for Netflix, I immediately added it to my queue. Unfortunately, as much as I took advantage of my instant queue, I was pretty slow to go through the actual disks they sent me. Last night, though, I finally got around to watching Porco Rosso, and while it isn't going to top Spirited Away (or even Totoro) on my list of my favorite Miyazaki movies, it was still absolutely delightful.

There isn't a whole lot of plot to Porco Rosso. Pretty much all of what you need to know is right there in the basic summary on the back of the disk. An ace Italian seaplane pilot fights sky pirates in the Adriatic (and resists Fascism in the mainland). Oh, and said pilot has suffered a curse that has turned him into an anthropomorphic pig. Like so much of Miyazaki's work, though, this isn't a movie that isn't about an elaborate sequence of unfolding events, so I can't find fault on this point.

Similarly, most of the characters aren't terribly deep. With the exception of Marco (the true name of the pilot feared by his enemies as Porco Rosso), most of the characters are pretty much open books. They wear their intentions and their characters on their sleaves. But since this also isn't a movie remotely concerned with exploring the nature of its characters' motivations, this isn't a drawback.

If the movie isn't about its plot or its characters, then, what's it's purpose? It's about spending some time in the company of some likable characters and observing their beautiful world. It's about seeing how these people interact with this world, remaining hopeful and carving out a niche for themselves despite the hardships and sadness that exist there. Really, it's a lot like Totoro if that movie were made for a slightly older demographic, one that prefers dogfights and star-crossed love to woodland exploration. Because of the increased complexity of the subject matter, it doesn't manage this style quite as well as Totoro (a movie I would describe as delightful); but it manages to be a perfectly enjoyable experience throughout.

*Mild spoilers from here until the final paragraph*

Other than Marco's affliction, the movie is strongly based in reality. It's 1929, the post-WW1 European Depression is in full swing, and the fascists are starting to take power in Italy. Times are hard, and everybody is doing what they can to survive and showing what courtesy they can afford to everybody else. At the beginning of the film, after Marco stops one band of pirates and recovers their hostages, he allows them to keep a portion of their stolen money so that they can affort to eat and repair their planes. He knows that this means running into them again (which, in a darker universe, could be seen as a motivation by itself), but he's not going to tell anybody that they can't fly. It's this sort of fundamental decency, contrasted with his gruff attitude and appearance, that defines Marco as a character. The world is a hard place, and he doesn't want to add any more sadness to it than he has to. He refuses to take a shot when it might result in another's death. He feels guilt when old women and young girls need to be brought in to do repairs on his plane, fundamentally a tool of destruction. Having seen his friends being robbed of their happiness by death in the War, he refuses to seek his own. It's a complex character, and it's portrayed as simply and subtly as one can imagine.

While Marco may be the protagonist, this wouldn't be a Miyazaki movie without a strong female protagonist, and, really, Porco Rosso has two: Fio and Gina. Gina shows up first, but Fio gets much more screen. Really, though, the two are cut from the same cloth, as can be seen by the almost identical interactions they have with the supporting cast. Neither is willing to accept that her womanhood is legitimate cause to keep her from doing what she loves. Both respond powerfully to Marco's strong convictions and masked gentleness, knowing that those same convictions will drive him to keep his distance. Neither character is allowed a great deal of depth, but this simplicity comes across as an earnestness. Both have such energy and faith in the fundamental goodness of people that it's not hard to see why every pilot in the Adriatic is in love with them.

The supporting cast of sky pirates, including the American pilot-for-hire and would-be antagonist Curtiss, are primarily there for humor, whether it's a result of a willingness to go to ridiculous ends to be free of Marco's meddling or a complete disconnect with reality. The real enemy isn't any of these desperate men, but the situation that drove them to such desperation; so when we see dozens of pirates bursting out of Marco's tent in an attempt to take him by force, it brings a smile to your face instead of a sense of dread.

Of course, being a Studio Ghibli film scored by Joe Hisaishi, everything is accentuated by gorgeous visuals and a wonderful soundtrack. I could watch Marco flying across the Italian countryside or the islands of the Adriatic while listening to "To the Adriatic Sea" for hours and feel nothing but contentment.

Ultimately, while Porco Rosso isn't going to challenge Spirited Away, Totoro, or Princess Mononoke to become one of my favorite three Miyazaki films, I really need to see Kiki's Delivery Service and Nausicaa again before I can have any confidence that it hasn't cracked my top 5. In any case, I immediately added it to my Amazon Wishlist and will probably watch it again (dubbed) with my family before sending it back.