Speed Screed: Metal Dad

I had the strangest vision of myself yesterday, as a forty-something father driving my kid or kids to school or something, blasting death metal from the late 90’s through the car’s stereo. There is something extremely odd about that idea. In terms of generation gaps, metal is not really the music of any particular generation – it’s a non-popular offshoot of rock and roll with a diverse number of influences including 20th century atonal music and folk music. So when my kids are rolling their eyes and asking of this is the music that my generation listened to, I would truthfully tell them “no.”

But of course this is true for many other genres besides metal. Jazz is very similar inasmuch as it went through its own set of revolutions and evolutions over time, but it was concurrent with popular music and not woven into it except in the most basic ways (blues’ influence on early rock, for example). But jazz is generally pretty unobjectionable; even if my kids didn’t like it, they probably wouldn’t be embarrassed by the fact that their dad listened to jazz.

On the other hand, there is a persistent weirdness about pulling into a school parking lot to drop off your children with “Smashing the Antiu” by Nile blasting out the speakers. Especially since, unless I miraculously end up being a metal musician, I sincerely doubt anything else about my attitude or personality would indicate any sort of stereotypical metal-like tendencies. I’d probably be driving some eco-friendly hybrid and waving goodbye while Karl Sanders is growling about disemboweling the enemies of the Pharaoh.

Now, obviously, I’d probably keep metal away from really young kids, although that they would almost certainly be completely unable to discern any of the lyrics. But the music my parents listened to influenced me a great deal, and I still ended up here with the strong opinion that metal stands head and shoulders in both quality and originality above all other genres of non-classical music. So maybe it hardly matters what they hear from me, they’ll probably end up just liking what they like and that will be that.

But the really funny thing to me is that there is essentially nothing “square” about death metal. It’s gritty, violent, intense, and for preference, fast. It’s just hard for me to picture my kids mocking the music I listen to for how “lame” or “old-fashioned” it is. There are plenty of other good reasons to mock it, but I can’t conceive of metal being associated with old timers.

The other thing is that death and black metal might be considered extreme (and actually good) offshoots of the angsty popular bands of recent years, so in that sense they are associated with the energy and conflicts of youth. On the other hand, what angsty teens listen to transliterated texts from Ancient Egypt being growled out over the most crunchy, dark riffs every to issue forth from a drop-A-tuned electric guitar?

Not many.

Nile rules.

Speed Screed: Exploiting Kids

You know, few things irritate me more than the use of children in commercials, particularly babies. This is the sort of genius advertising that comes from people following a line of thought like this:

“Everyone likes babies, since they’re cute. So how can I use this? Hmmm….I know! I’ll make this little baby explain to the watchers that this online investment company is the best in a completely mismatched voice, and then I’ll make him throw up on the keyboard, and everyone will go, ‘Awwwww!’ Brilliant!”

It might work on a few dopes whose brains shut down when they see a moderately cute baby, but for practically everyone else, they’ll just be annoyed that this poor kid is being forced to hock some shoddy product and he’s not even aware of it. To me its simply shameless exploitation of little kids.

You may also have seen that Target commercial where some kids are putting on a Christmas play and it ends with a stupid rhyme saying that Target is the best place to save for the holidays. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. First of all, I know that Christmas is pretty much about commercialism, but cheesy holiday plays put on by second-graders are not. No genuine play is going to include an overt advertisement for Target unless they sponsored the entire thing, and even if they did, it would cause spontaneous revulsion in the audience when they realized that Target’s only goal was to capitalize on the adorableness of the players to hock its wares.

I know I’m cynical, but this is not merely needless cynicism. This is simple logic. These sorts of ad campaigns rely on their audiences being more dimwitted than even I’m willing to believe. I can understand that certain people might enjoy the “cuteness” of the commercial, but at the same time I doubt that they would therefore make any sort of leap to purchase the thing advertised.

The “dancing baby” commercials that I think Blockbuster did maybe a decade ago were the worst. Another grievous miscalculation of what people would find entertaining and cute, whereas the end result was simply something creepy and pointless. Ultimately, unless you have kids genuinely acting like kids, the commercial is going to seem contrived and fall flat.

But that doesn’t seem to stop them from trying. Advertisements suck these days.

Speed Screed: Imagining the Tenth Dimension

One problem with dividing everything into “rants” and “raves” is that I don’t really have a neutral category. Obviously lumping things into “love” or “hate” is gross oversimplification that I use as a cheap draw. I may have to invent a new category for stuff that is simply interesting or informative, but that I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about. If I don’t have a strong opinion, you may find it boring, but at least I don’t have to pretend something is either wonderful or abhorrent. Not that I have yet. That’s called integrity. Ahem.

Anyway, I recently checked out this interesting video called “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” which was posted by the writer of a book of the same name, Rob Bryanton. It’s basically a technique that helps you wrap your head around some of the possibilities of the dimensions beyond the three (or four) that we experience, by using lower-dimensional analogies.

For example, if you collapse all of space into a point (i.e. three dimensions) then a line segment moving from that point to another is movement in the fourth dimension, which is roughly described as time (in truth I think it’s more complicated than the way it’s presented; the way the exercises handle time is a little too flippant) It’s an interesting exercise and I highly recommend it.

As a cautionary note though, this whole experience is really an exercise in philosophy and imagination than any sort of scientific model. I somehow doubt that a string theorist who works on Calabi-Yau spaces really considers the sixth dimension as movement between logically inconsistent realities. String theorists have more or less no physical evidence for their claims (though I still think the theory is a good one) so they use higher dimensions as a way to get the equations to balance out; in other words, string theory becomes a usable model when there is an assumption of ten (or eleven) dimensions, but I think they are viewed mathematically and not as “lines of travel” which is what this mental exercise basically assumes.

The author more or less admits that he is trying to reconcile philosophy and science in a certain fashion, but his spiritual and aesthetic side somewhat damages his scientific credibility. He also produced a series of songs that supposedly outline the key concepts of his book – but the man is not a professional songwriter so I felt mostly confusion at his attempts to use music. I felt that he was once again trying to blur the lines between rational discourse and intuitive spiritual belief. I personally believe that there is no such thing as an informative song – songs are not about transmitting information, at least, not in a form where it has any real-world use.

In short, I believe this is a good thing to watch in order to understand how lower-dimensional analogies can be useful in wrapping your head around things that seem impossible, but to take the entire thing with a grain of salt. Particularly telling was the way that he shaped the 10-dimension symbol like the Sefirot, the Tree of Life from the Jewish mystical tradition of Qabalah. Jumping to premature conclusions much?

Speed Screed: Barack Star

Other than the fact that a presidential election is a de facto popularity contest, pretty much by definition, the appeal of Barack Obama has been staggering – so much so that people are apparently already attempting to scalp non-existent tickets for his inaugural address – the interest is so staggering that as many as 4 million people have already expressed a desire to attend this event live. This number is huge. Clearly, that many people can’t attend, but you can imagine the battle for attendance this might entail.

Of course, the GOP was essentially lambasting Obama for being popular, and his election has naturally intensified this feeling. The media has crowned him with “rock star” status. By “the media,” though, I am referring to political obsessives like Rachel Maddow and not necessarily the mainstream media. While I definitely think it’s undeniably a good thing that people are excited about are new president, and am relieved that we can look to our Commander-and-Chief as a role model rather than a national embarrassment, I do think it’s somewhat irresponsible of the supposedly disinterested media to jump on the frenzied bandwagon here.

We all love Barack and we wish him well. We hope he will be able to be accomplish much – he certainly has the intelligence and temperament to handle this job. But I do hope that the media will not once again hand over a free pass to any President (like they did with Bush on the Iraq War) on principle. I sincerely believe that close media scrutiny must be restored – not because I don’t trust Obama, but because it is an absolutely critical component of any functioning democracy. The media need to sharpen their teeth again. What better time them with a President who has promised transparency and honesty? They need to get their groove back so when a stonewaller takes office they won’t be cowed into submission.

So when the media starts hitching a ride on the zeitgeist, I always get a little bit worried. As I said, we all deserve to celebrate and feel joy and renewed zeal at this historic time. Even the media may not be able to hold back its excitement for a little while. But what I don’t want to see is Barack’s popularity interfere with the media from doing its vital work, because the press needs to redeem itself for eight years of jingoism and underreporting.

Sometimes I wonder if we need a new generation of journalists. This old one hasn’t done much to help my faith in the media along.

Speed Screed: Pop Stagnation

Music doesn’t seem to have evolved much in the last ten years. Although I hardly started listening to popular music of any kind before 8th grade (I can’t even remember what I used to listen to), once I actually got into the music of the 90’s I realized there were actually many quality bands around. Beck, Rage Against the Machine, Sublime (to an extent), Nine Inch Nails; there were dozens of bands that didn’t suck. They weren’t derivative. They had some talent. In short, they were good.

I now know that death metal was really taking off during those years too, though I only learned that later. And hip-hop? Four words. A Tribe Called Quest. The 90’s were a serious decade as far as popular music went. The end of the millennium brought all the creative people out of the woodwork.

What the hell happened?

Music these days is unbelievably derivative. Other than a sneaking of country influences into the mainstream via cute Southern women singers who can also play acoustic guitar, I have yet to see anything new, or anything old enough to be re-branded as novel. A perfect example are these “Jonas Brothers.” Now there’s a shtick if ever I saw one. Their music is what I kindly term “post-alternative drek,” an amalgam of punk, emo and whining that was exemplified by Blink 182, though any band that uses that formula (including the Jonas Brothers) are still better than they were.

What sells them is that they’re three brothers, with their outfits coordinated. This is marketing designed to shoot right into the hormone-soaked early teenage girl market. They are not without talent or ability, but their music is absolutely nothing new, and it already sounds corporate. And if they’re the “hottest new band” as magazines and TV shows have publicly announced ad nauseum then I think we can draw a pretty good bead on what passes for music in the popular mind these days. The 00’s here are just castoff leftovers from the sound that wasn’t better produced in the 90’s. I mean, new wave was irritating, but at least it was a sound! People were trying! And at least the 60’s and 70’s saw the introduction of rock and even hints of progressive rock.

No wonder I listen to metal.

Speed Screed: Scads of Hardware

As the complexity of computers increases, so too does the number of things that can go wrong. Additionally, as more and more peripherals flood the market from competing companies, the possible hardware configurations of computers are increasing exponentially. This presents a real problem for game developers.
In the old days, there were maybe a dozen basic outfits that a computer could have, with a couple variations. Beta testing on virtually all available machines was practically possible. When a game was released, there was no chance of hardware or software compatibility – the games were pretty much designed on the same computers they were ultimately going to be run on.

These days, testing is becoming the longest part of game development. Any company that wants to take a stable release seriously has to put the game through its paces for an absurdly long time. This is because there are something like ten thousand possible rigs that meet the minimum requirements, and you never know what innocuous-seeming software is going to gum up the works. Any game that is released these days has a small contingent of people who get unexplained crashes to the desktop, horrible and archaic errors like total system freezes, or the extremely dreaded monitor completely deactivating until the computer is reset.

These poor souls love to bitch about what a horrible and buggy release it was, and how badly the developers screwed up. But it often has just as much to do with a publisher. The publisher is in it to make money, and they want the game out as fast as possible because they want to make their money back as fast as possible. The developers may tell them that they need six months of alpha and three months of beta and the publishers may only agree to half that amount, instead offering a longer contract for creating game patches and the like. Many publishers don’t seem to understand the fallout generated by a game that barely runs after someone dropped fifty bucks for it at the store. Some do, though.

Blizzard (although they merged with Activision) are notorious for taking godawful amounts of time to make games. This is because they understand the requirements for making a game these days, both in terms of innovation and also product testing. Blizzard’s famous attitude of “it’ll be done when we say it is” is really the only way to ensure a top-quality release that will require minimum patching and also that it will run on a huge number of systems.

The upshot of this is that it may be easier in the future to play games on consoles, since developers only have to make sure it runs flawlessly on ONE system. Considering I can get an Xbox 360 for much less money than a state-of-the-art video card (let alone a computer), this argument is persuasive indeed.

Speed Screed: Litigation Nation

No, I don’t need help out with my single two-pound grocery bag. Thanks for the offer though.

Not that I’m offended, despite my strapping young man status. But I am annoyed. I shop at Vons all the time and apparently it has become company policy to ask everyone, regardless of gender, age, or general fitness if they need help with their groceries. It could be a pack of gum, or a fifty-pound sack of potatoes. The customer could be a little old lady or a two-time world kickboxing champion. The same question must always be asked. Never mind the fact that grocery carts exist for the purpose of piling on the purchases and still being able to easily wheel them around.

Of course, there is logic to this. You don’t want people to feel excluded. Why only ask women? Why not ask men? Well, first of all virtually every non-disabled man is not going to ask for help with practically any amount of ordinary groceries. He’s even less likely to accept help from a female attendant. If you made it company policy not to ask men if they need help, I don’t think it’s going to matter.

But I somehow suspect the real reason was some lawsuit in the recent past. Some poor fool threw his or her back out trying to lift some groceries, sued them for selling groceries that were too heavy, won, and now Vons has instituted Operation Overkill: ask everyone if they need help. Or maybe even more likely, some woman behind the counter freaked out when the old lady in front of her was offered help but she wasn’t, and decided that it was discrimination other than, um, common sense. And now to cover their ass legally, they have to ask everyone the same damn question.

Even if I’m wrong about there being a lawsuit in this particular case, it’s the story of this country: legal action can be pursued even when it is you, the “victim,” that is clearly in the wrong. Many companies, like Mickey D’s, find it much easier to throw money at the problem until it goes away than actually defend itself from frivolous lawsuits. Make no mistake: McDonald’s can afford some extremely good lawyers, but the publicity from squelching these people’s pointless lawsuits would probably be worse financially than offering someone a few hundred grand to quietly go away. It’s a beautiful system, in its way.

Of course, for most of these register people, it’s become a mantra: they don’t actually think about the words that are passing out of their lips, they just say them because they have to. I suspect that if I actually said “yes” they would probably reel in disbelief. I have no desire to do that, though, because these people’s jobs are irritating enough without me wasting their valuable time to prove a point for a self-indulgent blog.

Bye.

Speed Screed: Meaningless Advertising

In some ads, there seems to be this idea that attitude sells more than, say, actual words. Some of these phrases that get tossed around are actually completely meaningless, even though they seem reasonable. A favorite I saw on television recently was a Kia commercial. They refer to their cars as “stylishly affordable.” It sounds good, but actually it’s complete gibberish.

Consider that the adverb, stylishly, describes the word “affordable.” Generally, affordable is not a word that takes much description, other than that of degrees, i.e. “somewhat affordable, very affordable,” etc. However, not only are Kias apparently affordable, but stylishly so. That is to say that you can afford them in style. They are priced stylishly.

I know I’m rambling on about pointless crap more than usual, but advertisements in general annoy me greatly. Many of them suck, and I swear they suck more so than in the past. Many commercials these days are what I refer to as “pseudo-clever,” where they try to do something witty and it ends up simply being kitsch because they don’t have any idea of timing, tension, or how to deliver a punch line. I know I could write better commercials than 90% of the hacks at these ad agencies. I don’t because I think my ability to write could be better put to use, such as complaining about things rather than trying to fix them.

See? A joke. Ahem.

Personally, I long for the old commercials from the 50’s, where they simply tell you to buy it. The old “Enjoy Coke” ads in 50’s-style diners really cut to the chase. At least with an ad like that, I don’t have to wait through a poorly constructed quasi-narrative arc or an unfunny joke to find out what it is that I don’t want to buy.

Truly, DVR and TiVo have made watching TV so much less of a waste of time than in the past. Part of the reason I don’t watch TV is I don’t like watching ads, and that’s also why I download 90% of the stuff I want to watch. Consider also that the best shows are actually all of 20 minutes long since stations make the vast majority of their advertising money during a two-hour block known as “prime-time.” Simpsons episodes these days are actually about 21 minutes. They’ve been getting shorter, which I believe is part of the reason they got worse for a season or two; the writers couldn’t usually get a decent B plot going in the face of five or so missing minutes. For the more recent seasons, the episodes have been up to snuff but have been sort of like “Simpsons Lite” because there still is a weaker B plot.

Enough of my chattering. See you tomorrow.

Speed Screed: Soft Drinks and the Restaurant Industry

It just occurred to me, today, that soft drinks must have revolutionized the restaurant industry. Before Coke, Pepsi, and their ilk were around there were basically three things you could drink in your average restuarant besides booze: milk, coffee, or water. Water was free, and milk was basically a concession to kids. Kids would probably just be drinking water anyway.

But along comes soft drinks, and now there’s something special that kids can drink as a treat while their parents kick back a beer or two. Not only does that mean that there’s a whole host of drinks to be targeted to the spending money of minors, but it also means that restaurants can buy cheap and sell dear on a drink that really only costs them a couple of cents a glass. After all, if all the other drinks on the menu are already a couple bucks, you can easily inflate the true costs of a glass of soda into a tidy little profit for yourself.

I mean, any beverage that comes with free refills nine times out of ten is obviously so cheap that one person can’t even drink enough to lose money on the deal. I’ll bet you that this “buoying up” of the ability of restaurants to operate at a profit sparked a boom in the restaurant industry. I couldn’t readily find any statistics to support this assertion, but that’s alright because I enjoy being wrong, if it turns out I am. Still, it’s a pretty compelling product from a marketing point of view. People often drink several cans a day. And the profit margin is absurd. I often wonder if soda is one of the most “marked-up from cost” products, though bottled water is still, I think, the winner in that category. As Penn Jillette said on an episode of Bullshit!, selling bottled water is like minting your own money.

The profit margin on alcohol, by comparison, can obviously also be pretty good, particularly for cocktails and wine. But only adults can drink booze. The fact that you target the kids too is what makes soda so particularly effective as a method of getting more money from your average customer.

And lets not forget that soda companies has actually forged a minor cultural bond. In the old days you’d take your date to get a soda at the drugstore – like going out to a bar, but much more lame. There you have the iconic picture of the two teenagers on a date drinking the same soda that is resurrected by Coca-Cola every couple of years. Of course, back then that was as close as you could get to kissing in public. But I digress.

Now they have the a small “stake in America” angle that so many domestic beer companies capitalize on; not to the same extent, but Coca-Cola is at least responsible for Santa Claus in his current red-suited incarnation. And of course they run the commercials with the young people tricking out their bicycles and jousting with them and then all sitting around and drinking Coke and laughing. Not too subtle. But I also sadly realized that these kids are all sitting around and drinking coke and laughing because they aren’t allowed to drink beer. Otherwise they’d probably be getting trashed and then running their bikes into each other. I mean, wouldn’t we all?

Speed Screed: Specialty Restaraunts

In Japan, there is a curious culinary phenomenon that is partially influenced by Zen philosophy: restaurants that only serve one type of food. And I don’t they only serve Chinese food, or Indian food, for example. I mean this restaurant only serves tempura. Or eel.

The idea is this: A place that serves only tempura will necessarily serve better tempura than a place that serves tempura along with other items. This idea is logically true first and foremost on an economic basis; if a place only serves one kind of item, then people will only go to that restaurant for that item, and it’s success would logically be predicated on whether better tempura is available anywhere else, including other more general restaurants. Since it’s a sink or swim proposition, they have to make good tempura to succeed. We’re used to this phenomenon in the States mostly in the form of sushi bars. Hell, in real sushi bars you don’t even get to pick what you want; the chef just gives you what he wants, or what he thinks you’ll like.

The Zen part comes in with the “doing one thing to the point of mastery” idea. That’s the philosophy behind the Zen tea ceremony, for example. The actual performance of a tea ceremony, in terms of formal steps, is relatively simple. But the ability to do something perfectly and yet naturally is the heart of learning any discipline, including martial arts. You may think the analogy somewhat far-fetched, but this can even be applied to cuisine. Some guy who has been making tempura for 30 years is going to turn out perfect tempura every time. And perfect tempura every time is how one keeps a tempura-only restaurant going. As well as how one keeps it profitable; after all, if you’re dropping twenty bucks for a couple pieces of tempura, you’ll be happy to do it if it’s amazingly good, and quite pissed off if it isn’t. Such is the delicate balance these specialty restaurants maintain.