My New Favorite Books, or, IT’S REESE’S PUFFS CEREAL!!!!!
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When a politician changes their mind, they are labeled a “flip-flopper” and are thus incentivized to stick to their ideological guns, evidence and personal growth be damned. I, however, harbor no such limitations, and it is in this spirit of personal fluidity that I change my favorite things quite frequently. I recently discovered and read what is my current favorite book, and I have been dying to get the time to share it with you here.
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. (more…)
Kick-Ass
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Sometimes, it’s the movies that I like best that are the most difficult to write about.
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.
Nook 1.3: Now With Web Browser
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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.
Puppets!
0Ryan showed me this cool music video.
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!
Artists
0I just read Roger Ebert’s latest.
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.
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- Ron Gilbert, Monkey Island series
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- Roberta Williams, Kings Quest Series
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- Jonathan Blow, Braid
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- Tim Schafer, Grim Fandango, Pyschonauts
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- Wil Wright, Sim City, Spore
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- Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario Brothers
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- Jason Rohrer, Passage
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- Peter Molyneux, Fable 1 & 2
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- Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, The Path
PenIslandDotCom
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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.
Wherein things are Yay.
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After months of feeling like a lonely cosmonaut left on his own to care for an interplanetary fueling station, I found out today that my boss has finally hired more people to fill my position at work. After they’re trained and in place, it’ll only be a matter of time until I get promoted to Gates, a position I’ve been trying to get for a year.
So yay.
In similarly happy news, after what seemed like months, I got my Segway PT back from repairs.
So double yay.
Conservatory of Flowers and the Bay Area Garden Railway
0The Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park has a special exhibit right now set up by the Bay Area Garden Railways society. It’s a model train layout of famous San Francisco landmarks, and all of the buildings are made out of recycled materials, like computer floppy disks, old milk crates, bottles, circuit boards, cereal boxes, and light fixtures. Here are some photographs that I took of the layout, and of some of the flowers in the Conservatory.
Wretched Writing
0How wretched you are, Writing!
Page upon page will never endure,
But ten lines can last forever.
A verse on a scrap can wrench hearts and minds
While gold trimmed volumes might warp only shelves.
A poor sculptor’s work is forever a thing
An ugly tchotchke on a loved one’s mantle.
But a writer’s failure has no grip on the world.
Where can I find the purity to write for Eternity?
Or must I find the courage to face sure obscurity?
Love The Nook, But It Needs…
0I got a Barnes and Noble Nook for Christmas.
I’m not sure I need to review it more in-depth than, “I love it.”
I did just have some ideas for how it could be better, and I wanted to put them down on here.
Nook Needs:
Automated Shelfari integration.
Instead of using an on-screen d-pad on the touchscreen to move a cursor around the e-paper screen to select text for highlighting and dictionary lookups, use the touch screen to show the page above in scrollable, 3-line chunks, and use iPhone-esque gestures to highlight words or chunks of text.
A mode where Airplane mode (which pretty much needs to be on all the time except when you’re specifically looking to shop the store or download content so that your battery can be conserved) goes on and off by default when it’s needed. I guess that this would be more like an option that says, “Don’t ever automatically check for new content and updates.” They could make it so you could change content-check intervals, and that might also help with battery life without having to actually shut down all of the radios (wifi and cell) on the thing.
Predictive text input. This one isn’t super-critical, as if you’re used to the iPhone’s keyboard the Nook keyboard is a breeze, but it would be nice.
The ability for advanced users to remap what the buttons on the device do. I understand that this might be something that they’d be cautious of allowing, as the page turn buttons are very clearly labeled for their precise purpose and it would be very confusing to someone new to the Nook to pick up their friend’s and have the buttons be configured backwards, for instance, but I think that advanced users should be able to customize things like this. Just hide it deep, deep within the options menus. 
Picture browsing mode.
In general, the Nook needs to use the touchscreen for more than just menus. They can display whatever they want down there, so why not use it? There are certain situations where the philosophy of using the touchscreen as a menu to control the much slower e-paper screen just makes no sense compared to the idea of just directly interfacing the user with the text on the touch screen.
Nook could use some community oriented features to help set it apart. How about letting me automatically tweet and update my facebook when I buy a new book or when I finish a book? This goes along with Shelfari integration, I think. Make something like Last.FM but for books.
The on-device store could use a better interface for sorting and browsing. The Barnes and Noble’s web site interface has those features, so just port them over. In addition, the whole Barnes and Noble store experience could use a better recommendation system so that it’s easy to find similar books.
The thing that I think makes the Barnes and Noble Nook stand out from the rest of the e-reader crowd is that everything that I just said is completely within the realm of possibility. The Nook is the first e-reader that CAN be modified in fundamental ways, because their interface is in no way set in stone. When you have physical buttons, your options are limited. When you have a touch screen, the world is your oyster.
And that’s why the Nook is awesome.