Prospectors buying supplies in Seattle

The other day, I found myself utterly captivated by a long pictorial exhibition of Seattle during the Klondike Gold Rush. As I wandered down the long hallway upon whose walls these sepia toned memories hung, I realized the great incongruity of my experiences with these pieces and the experiences of the hurried businesspeople who walked the halls alongside me. As their shoes and rolling laptop cases CLICK-CLACKED down the subterranean tunnel between the Hilton and the conference center, I heard instead the sounds of the Seattle train yards of the 19th century. They were rushing to meetings; I was mentally running my fingers over the leather and wood seat of a merchant’s stagecoach. And while they chattered into their cell phones, it was all I could do to keep my teeth from chattering, so real was the icy chill of Chilkoot Pass to my imagination.

Chilkoot Pass

In the hour or so I spent poring over these images, no one else so much as slowed their pace to look. It made me wonder– had I ever seen anyone else read the information cards next to the Native American vases in the cases at the San Francisco Airport? Had I ever seen anyone else read the placards next to the collection of Art Deco radios in the lobby of that hotel I stayed at one time? Was I the only one who ever stopped in lobbies and hallways and accent alcoves to read and to examine and to learn the things that other people thought were important enough to put on display?

I could think of only one other person who I had ever seen attack the world’s free and public knowledge the way that I did: my father. I imagined that he had gathered these photographs, written the descriptions, and hung them on the wall in that perfect, flawless way that he does everything, right there underneath downtown Seattle, just for me to find.

And in a way, he did. If he hadn’t shown me how to be interested in everything, how to learn, how to explore, I never would have stopped, never even noticed that the CLICK-CLACK of my shoes was reverberating off of any history at all.

Thanks, Dad.

So, is it good? Maybe. I certainly enjoyed myself. But I couldn’t help but feel that Scott Pilgrim succeeded in all of the ways that I expected it to fail, and failed in all of the ways that I expected it to succeed.

To start, Scott Pilgrim vs The World is an embarrassingly shallow movie. Every character, save Scott’s gay roommate Wallace Wells (played by Kieran Culkin), is almost completely unlikable on their own. On more than one occasion, I asked myself, “Why am I rooting for these characters?” There seemed to be an expectation from the film makers that I should blindly empathize with Scott Pilgrim simply because he was the story’s protagonist. But Scott is often morally reprehensible, and he experiences few moments of personal growth, and none that are anything but self-aggrandizing moments of “learning the power of self-respect.”

So why did I like him anyway? Was it because I’d read the graphic novels, and knew that there was more to him than that? No, not that. Was it because Scott himself is funny and often confused? No, it’s not that either. The fact is, I was completely drawn in by what the film does well. Scott Pilgrim vs The World is designed as a mechanism to elicit a very specific Pavlovian response in video gamers. When a film opens with a pixel-art Universal logo and an 8-bit rendition of the Universal fanfare, and the first shot of the film is scored with a piece of music from The Legend of Zelda, how else can a gamer respond? As characters are introduced, VH1-esque pop-up boxes appear, detailing their “stats”. Game sound effects permeate the soundtrack. Basic character activities like changing clothes are time compressed within scenes, giving the impression that Scott has gone into the menu, equipped some new items, and jumped back in without a pause in the action. Every comically violent death is accompanied by a shower of coins and a reward of points. The story structure itself is a giant homage to fighting games, comprising mainly of boss fights punctuated by cut-scenes that exist only to move things forward to the next battle sequence.

As a gamer, I loved it all. I laughed at every joke, I made little “squee!” noises at every reference, and I relished the fact that someone had finally made a film that spoke to the shared cultural memory of my people. It made us Heroes. But what I hate is that it attempted to honor us with a story and characters that mimic only the most facile and simplistic game experiences. All of the beautiful complexity and unique philosophical depth that I know that games are capable of was left by the wayside. And while I know this was a conscious decision to keep the film accessible (far more people have played the classic, yet simplistic, games referenced in Scott Pilgrim), I can’t help but be disappointed by the fact that gamers will be identified with such a weak film.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World is cute references and funny in-jokes held together with a duct-tape and chewed gum plot. It’s enjoyable fan-service, but this formula does not a compelling movie make. Don’t expect very many positive reviews of outside of gaming culture. Scott Pilgrim won’t win the mainstream over.

A note, as mentioning this did not really fit within my review: I’m curious as to how many other critics notice what I think is one of the most interesting “torch-passing” scenes I’ve ever seen. In a certain scene in the film, game tropes are put on the backburner, and television sitcom references (especially Seinfeld) take the center stage. It seemed so out of place, until I realized that it’s there as a cultural key. “Look at this scene,” the director seems to say, “If you don’t understand what we’re doing here, look at this scene. Now do you understand?” I thought it was interesting.

It’s two books, actually. Two books, seemingly unrelated, but like peanut butter and chocolate, they combine two great flavors to create not just Candy for Breakfast, but Reese’s Puffs Cereal! Except for your brain’s taste buds. Or something.

Anyway. I will extricate myself from this sticky swirl of a digression and deliver to you a literary combination that the painfully hip employees at the University Bookstore seem to be unaware of, given their generally uninspired shelf of Staff Recommendations.

I can’t be too harsh, though. It’s rare to find a long collection of fictional stories like The Years of Rice and Salt that can pair so well with a dense, data-enriched non-fiction book like Guns, Germs, and Steel. But here are two book so grounded, yet so grand and ambitious, that they can’t help but enrich each other in fascinating ways.

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson is a book about what the world might have been like had the Bubonic Plague killed 95% of Christendom instead of 30%. It’s a collection of stories, arranged chronologically, of this alternate history. Tying them all together is a thread of reincarnation; the same characters are present throughout the book, and though the details of their traits, like gender, class, and even species, change, their spirits do not. One can follow these character threads by noting the first letters of each character’s name, as they remain the same throughout.

This is a brilliant literary device, as it allows Robinson to explore the infinite gradient of human experience while addressing the universality of human nature. This grounds the story, and is indeed its thesis– people are always the same, when the superficial trappings of culture are removed.

This is what I found so fascinating about The Years of Rice and Salt. By showing me, for example, a story about the Scientific Enlightenment occurring in Samarkand, instead of Europe, I was able to see that the way that people think is universal, that the excitement of the development of science requires nothing more than the curiosity inherent in us all.

But the great thing about The Years of Rice and Salt is that it doesn’t limit itself to just showing how science would have developed in this world, but also politics, war, religion, and even feminism. In concert, all of these facets work together to craft a beautiful, moving story that on more than one occasion brought tears to my eyes. Robinson understands, first and foremost, that people are what make the world beautiful, and that the juxtaposition of our cultural differences and our universal humanity is what gives the world texture.

But in reading The Years of Rice and Salt, the active, thoughtful reader will begin to wonder why exactly it took an imagined super-plague to upset the European hegemony that our world so markedly shows. If people are all the same, fundamentally, then why has there been an imbalance of power in the world as we know it? It was in pursuit of the answer to this question that led me to our second, non-fiction book, Guns, Germs, and Steel.

In this acclaimed book by biologist/anthropologist Jared Diamond, a thesis is laid out that attempts to describe why exactly certain civilizations progressed to a modern, first-world state, while others seem stuck in hunter-gatherer or subsistence farming states. This is, of course, a delicate subject, but Diamond handles it with the unbiased grace of a scientist, presenting data and evidence to back up his claim that the only thing differentiating the development of civilization is geographic location. It is a brilliant and enlightening read that taught me about about geography, evolution, meteorology, plant and animal domestication, and even Game Theory. The Years of Rice and Salt primed me for Diamond’s lessons, and I found myself drinking in his explanations and theories with a voracious appetite. Like Robinson’s novel, Guns, Germs, and Steel’s underlying pattern of thought is that people everywhere are just as capable and intelligent as everyone else. Indeed, Diamond points out, the fact that we can create massive metropolises and survive in the harshest of climates are both great indicators of our awesome ingenuity.

I honestly can’t recommend this pair of books enough. I’m certain that I will look back on the three week period I spent consuming these two tomes as one of the most intellectually influential times in my life. After reading The Years of Rice and Salt and Guns, Germs, and Steel, it felt like my eyes had been opened to the incredible beauty and wonder of people and our civilizations on our amazing planet, and I feel confident that you can have this awe-inspiring experience, too.

It’s easy to pull apart and examine films that aren’t great. How to Train Your Dragon, for example, was a decent, though not spectacular, family-oriented animated romp. Its visuals were great, though lacking the polish of a Pixar film, and its story was cute enough, but it dragged somewhat to start and could’ve had a stronger script. C+, B- is its final score, in my opinion.

See? Easy.

On the other hand, approaching a film like Kick-Ass, a film so superbly crafted, so incredibly choreographed and so wittily incisive, is a tall order. Where do I start? Do I focus on its excitement, its beautifully bad-ass fight scenes that pit interesting, flawed, yet relatable heroes against shrewd enemies? Should I instead choose to focus on its commentary, the brainy aspects behind its perfected pugilism, and laud the fact that it examines and challenges the idea of vigilante justice in a similar way as Watchmen? Or maybe I should begin by talking about its quasi-realistic, Tarantino-esque style that intermixes images of brutal violence with the fantasy of superheroism?

I suppose that the most succinct way for me to communicate how I felt about Kick-Ass is to say that I’ve seen it three times, and believe that it was well worth it. It takes what I thought were the most interesting parts of Watchmen, namely the critical examination of normal people acting as a vigilante, costumed superheroes, and throws away all of the “inside baseball” type comic industry and culture trappings that make Watchmen somewhat difficult for non-fans to understand and take seriously. If you have any interest in watching an exciting action movie with interesting characters, you should definitely check it out.

In an entirely unrelated observation, anthypophora is so useful, rhetorically.

More buttons have been added to the home screen

The latest update for the Barnes and Noble Nook is out today.

This update adds

• More speed improvements when reading books
• A more robust Wi-Fi manager
• Interactive Sudoku and Chess games
• A beta version of a web browser

This is the most encouraging software update to the Nook yet. When I first heard about the Nook and thought about how a color touch screen interface would be utilized by an e-reader, I imagined that the touch screen would be used like a window into the e-paper screen. It could be used to display small sections of whatever is displayed on the top screen, presenting the user with a scrollable, touchable interface to make selecting words for highlights, notes, and reference simple and easy.

Of course, when the Nook shipped, it didn’t do this it all. Instead, it had a kludgy interface where a virtual D-Pad appeared on the bottom screen to control a cursor on the top screen that moved about as slow as a molasses.

The virtual D-Pad.

This update doesn’t fix this.

cwknight.com rendered on the Nook's new web browser

But what this update does do is show that at least one person doing software development for the Nook platform understands this idea. When surfing the web in the Nook’s new web browser, the bottom screen behaves in exactly the sort of way I described above. The top screen shows a black and white image of the entire page, and features a selection box exactly the size of the bottom screen overlayed on the web page. By scrolling with their fingers, the user can move this viewing box over the web page, and its contents are shown, interactive and in full color, on the Nook’s touch screen.

Shall we play a nice game of chess?

Playing games is done in a similar way. Again, the touch screen shows a sliver of the top screen’s action, and the user can smoothly scroll the view, allowing full and direct interaction with what is displayed on the top screen.

So while this update doesn’t add these same sorts of features to reading e-books for interacting with text, it is good to see that the Nook team is working on the problem and that they actually do understand exactly what the touch screen interface can do for them. It’s clear to me now that, in the long run, the Nook is the better choice for people interested in investing in a dedicated e-reader platform.

For those interested, I’m currently reading The Years of Rice and Salt.

I think it’s really well done! It reminds me a lot of the game Machinarium (which I reviewed at Geeky Pleasures). In fact, Jakub Dvorský of Amanita Designs, creators of Machinarium, worked on an upcoming Czech film made with puppets. This is the trailer.

It’s fun to see puppets used in such awesome and creative ways!

My addition to the cultural dialog:

If a bunch of people can get together with a stage, a set, a director, some lights, a script, and some imagination and make art, then why is it’s art-ness suddenly nullified when the director invites every member of the audience to play the starring role?

Here’s a photo gallery of the first 10 people that popped into my head when I thought of gaming’s auteurs.

For each of these men and women, I can say, without a doubt, that I interpret the world differently after having interacted with their work.

And for that, I thank them.

Eli taking photos for an upcoming unboxing article

My friend Eli has gotten into fountain pens recently, going so far into pen fandom that he has become an extremely active member of the Fountain Pen Network, posting pen unboxing photos and lengthy reviews. I just so happened to be hanging out with him when he received a couple of new pens that feature a unique filling system. Check out this video.

Pretty crazy.

As for me, my pen of choice is the Kaweco Sport, with Diamine Emerald ink.

So yay.

In similarly happy news, after what seemed like months, I got my Segway PT back from repairs.

So double yay.