Benjamin Hourigan

A paper of mine on the social education of youth in Final Fantasy 6, 7, & 8 appears today. It’s in the online journal Reconstruction: Studies in contemporary culture, in a special issue on videogame culture.

This paper (mentioned in a previous post) has a tortured history. The editors of this issue of Reconstruction, Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman, had initially issued a call for papers for a book of collected essays. Having put the collection together, they struggled in vain to find a publisher, and eventually gave up and decided to publish the essays in the journal. Aside from my own essay, there’s a lot papers on interesting subjects in the special issue, so check it out. Just be prepared to endure some awful web-design on the site.

If you’re actually planning to read the essay, I recommend my unofficial PDF version. As far as I know, it contains the exact same text, but unlike the official version, it won’t assault your eyes with a monospaced font.

Nick Hornby, How to Be Good (London: Penguin, 2001), 244pp. ★★★ (3 stars)

I got this as a Christmas present from Mum and Dad: unusual, since in Australia I’ve got so many unread books that I never read anything that people give me, and I think they know that. But they rightly guessed that books, of which I have few here, would cheer me up in Japan, where I am thoroughly miserable, and they were right.

It’s fitting, then, that the protagonist of this book comes closest to happiness at the end of the story, when, reading a biography of Vanessa Bell, she realises:

It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn’t stale, that hasn’t been breathed by my family a thousand times already. (242)

This is Katie Carr, the doctor who, some 240 pages earlier, told her husband that she didn’t like living with him any more and wanted a divorce. Trouble is, the divorce didn’t take. Her obnoxious, angry, and sarcastic husband, David, first refused to acknowledge it, then underwent a miscellaneous spiritual conversion that drove him to make the lives of the downtrodden better, at the cost of making his family’s life chaotic and miserable. Finally, David’s fervour having receded, Katie rediscovers reading while settling back into a marriage that acts as perfect evidence for her despair at life. “Anyway, who lives a beautiful life that I know?”, she asks,

It’s no longer possible, surely, for anyone who works for a living, or lives in a city, or shops in a supermarket, or watches TV, or reads a newspaper, or drives a car, or eats frozen pizzas. A nice life, possibly, with a huge slice of luck and a little spare cash. And maybe even a good life, if… Well, let’s not go into all that. But rich and beautiful lives seem to be a discontinued line. (241)

In between her first attempt to leave her husband, and the final page on which she gazes out into the emptiness of space, into which escapes her last flicker (for the book) of family feeling, Katie lives through a veritable maelstrom of family drama and social activism. Yet both she and her husband emerge from it as emotionally dead as they were before. It’s this deadness, apparently, that Katie and David try to compensate for. First they do it with anger, then with attempts to be “good” by taking in homeless children, bringing crazy patients home for dinner. Through it all, they wallow in the compulsory bucketloads of in-bad-faith middle-class guilt.

How to Be Good appears, at first, to really ask: “how can one live a ‘good’ life”, and to do it at the same time as lampooning middle-class, bleeding-heart leftism and charity. And although Hornby manages to extract some laughs, an enjoyable read, and some clever writing from David and Katie’s respectively willing and unwilling adventures in philanthropy, this is one of those books that struggles to know what it is about, what its point and message is. So, too, Katie and David fail to discover what it is that they are or should be about: hence Katie’s eventual belief that beautiful lives are no longer even possible.

The problem, I’d venture to say, is that they chose the wrong path. The trick to a rich life is to be not good, but great; to do what is beautiful and what enriches oneself, instead of what helps others. Katie and David ultimately lack the imagination and the guts to find and do that which will enlarge them, and sink back into the drab life they began the book attempting to escape. And that is very ugly and depressing indeed. The lost will find no worthy solutions here to whatever malaise they feel.

They may, however, find some solace in Hornby’s very convincing depictions of everyday spiritual deadness and romantic unfulfilment. Several passages about Katie and David’s relationship breakdown reminded me very much of the dullness and the mounting resentment that beset my last relationship. In this area, Hornby has a stunning eye for detail and for the feeling of withered loves. While there’s little cheer to be had here, it’s in this observational element that How to be Good becomes worth reading, a book with something to teach. It is a warning, perhaps, against letting our feelings and our loves die once, since they are not easily resurrected.

I had the misfortune of falling sick today, my one day off this week. So I spent several hours finishing reading Penny Arcade. Yes, all of it, from the first strip (11 November 1998) to the most recent 10 February 2006. I’m pleased to say that the strip has gotten better over time (as it should), and that it richly deserves its ubiquity. Kudos to you, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins: you made my sick-day a lot better than it might have been.

Novell recently announced its release of the Xgl code that it’s been working on by itself for a while. There are some videos of the upcoming Novell Linux Desktop 10 (NLD) at the release page. The above picture is a mockup released a few months ago, but as Jono Bacon has written, it’s very similar to what’s on show in the videos.

So, NLD is about to have MacOS-X-style window compositing capabilities, some Exposé-style functionality, integrated desktop search, via Beagle, and probably more. GNOME can have this, too. As I wrote about a year ago, the lack of such things was among the reasons I use OSX and not Linux.

These changes might finally put the usability of Linux desktops on par or ahead of Windows and OSX, if we also see better and more reliable video playback, Flash plugins, and so on. They might just bring be into the Linux fold for my daily work, and not just for the odd bit of OS experimentation.

So let’s put aside whatever politics are involved in Novell’s behind-closed-doors development of Xgl, and get the changes into GNOME, and into other distros. I don’t know much about GNOME version-numbering decisions, but this is big. This is GNOME 3.0. Let’s have it.

Today I’ve been reading about the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons controversy…

To summarise briefly, in September 2005, a Danish newspaper (the Jyllands-Posten) published a collection of caricatures of Mohammed. Doing so was intended to highlight a feeling that artists were self-censoring, afraid to depict Mohammed because of fear of reprisal from Muslim extremists—Islam forbidding depictions of Mohammed, and indeed of any humans and animals. On which point, though it’s jumping the gun slightly: if Muslim extremists are going to get upset about caricatures of Mohammed, shouldn’t they also be taking umbrage at the Mona Lisa, photo-portraiture in newspapers, and so on? The caricatures in question were reprinted in a Norwegian newspaper and in some other European newspapers. Very recently, some very-slow-on-the-uptake Syrian extremists decided to riot about the issue, and laid waste to the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria. For more detail, see Wikipedia: Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons controversy.

The whole episode has prompted the usual, tortured, Western meditations on how we ought to treat the sensibilities of Islamic extremists, with a good many people insisting that we must respect their religious symbols and superstitions, and tread lightly lest we set off their hair-trigger and bring on a flaming berserker rage complete with assaults and assasinations. Some of this self-torturing took the form of arguing that European newspapers should not republish the caricatures to let their readers see what all the fuss was about.

French journal France-Soir republished the caricatures, with the front-page headline “Oui, on a le droit de caricaturer le dieu” (“Yes, we have the right to caricature god”). Unfortunately, France Soir’s owner, Raymond Lakah, fired the chief editor over the republication.

But France-Soir’s headline, arguing that we have the right to caricature god, does not even go far enough. People of sound mind ought to saturate the world, as much as possible, with images, words and so on that blaspheme against the idols held so sacred by religious fanatics. We ought to forever desacralise these names and concepts of Jesus, Mohammed, and so on, to strip them of their power to inspire belief, devotion, hatred, and bad faith.

It’s one of the great tragedies of human history that hundreds of years of criticism of religion have not succeeded in stamping out belief in gods and adherence to their edicts. Wikipedia’s article on Atheism states that “A 1995 survey [17] attributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica indicates that the non-religious are about 14.7% of the world’s population, and atheists around 3.8%.” That’s a staggeringly low proportion of people who are educated and sensible enough to know that gods are fictional, and that their whims and demands do not bind us. Unfortunately, most of the world’s population appears not to have had the opportunity to learn this.

The enlightened of the world ought to be absolutely merciless with those who destroy lives and property in the names of such non-existent gods, or as retaliation for blasphemy against them. So someone drew a picture of Mohammed with a bomb on his head… So what? There is no Allah whose sensibilities to offend by doing so. There is no Christian god offended by Piss Christ. The offense given by the most strident critics of religion is nothing compared to the riots, the destruction, and the assasinations perpetrated by religious, and particularly Muslim, fanatics. We ought to think of such acts in the normal terms, as crimes, and we ought if necessary fill our jails with hooligans and ideologues who carry out and incite murder, assault, and vandalism in the name of gods.

And while we suffer no crimes in the name of god, we should suffer too no preciousness about images and ideas of god. Gods are not real. There is nothing holy to be blasphemed against. It is possible, though, to offend the sensibilities of those who believe in gods and other holy things, and we must offend and ridicule such people until they relent, and join the society of the wise.

★★ (2 stars)

The UK’s Channel 4 has just started a new sitcom, The IT Crowd, which tries to make comedy out situations in a corporate IT-support department. I’m no TV afficionado, so for more background, see this article this in today’s edition of Melbourne’s The Age newspaper.

The most remarkable thing about The IT Crowd is that Channel 4 has decided to offer the show for streaming and download on its site. To that, I give a massive thumbs-up. I don’t watch TV, and I’ve got no interest in doing so. Give me something I can download or watch on DVD and you’ve got a chance at capturing my attention. I’ll watch what I like, when I like: fixed-schedule TV is so 20th century…

A massive thumbs-down to Channel 4, though, for only offering the show in .wmv format. This decision means that only Windows users will have an easy time of watching the show, and Linux users will be unlikely to view the clip at all. Note to all broadcasters: when offering content for download, choose an open format, or one with cross-platform support. MPEG, H.264, Xvid, DivX and Theora are all acceptable.

I suppose it’s lucky that Linux users won’t be able to watch the show easily—unless they choose to use their TV—because they’re among the people most likely to notice one of the show’s most serious flaws. For a show that’s about an IT department, you’d expect to have some computer-savvy people on the writing staff. Not so with The IT Crowd. Within the first few minutes, we hear a character (pictured above) say this to someone on the phone:

Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

[scene cuts to other conversation, then returns…]

You see the driver hooks a function by patching the system call table, so it’s not safe to unload it, unless another thread’s about to jump in there and do its stuff, and you don’t want to end up in the middle of invalid memory… [character laughs].

As far as I’ve learned in almost 20 years of using computer systems from the Apple IIe to OS X, Windows XP, and Linux, this is absolute nonsense masquerading as computer jargon. Computer jargon is baffling enough to outsiders that they might be convinced it’s a joke anyway, but to someone who understands real computer jargon this just looks like the writers don’t know a fucking thing about computers—just like the IT manager character they’re trying to lampoon.

Some of the computer-related jokes are okay, like this one:

Did you notice how she didn’t even get excited when she saw this original ZX81?

And there’s some decent lines, like this one, which reminds me of Baldric from Black Adder:

A plan… Let me put on my slightly larger glasses.

But most of the humour is meant to come from making fun of computer nerds and their imagined social ineptitude. Nerds haven’t been funny since the early 1990s, if indeed they ever were. And if it was ever true that the computer savvy were mostly socially inept, it’s not true now. Computing is an integral part of mainstream work life these days, in just about any profession, and the people who use computers are as diverse as one would expect. Of course, there are some people (and I am among them) who take an interest in computing that goes beyond the merely necessary, those who are expert at computing out of interest or professional necessity. But those people aren’t simply obsessed geeks: they have other interests, other skills and goals … in the main.

These days, to make truly effective comedy out of computing culture, you have to find humour in the unique ways that computing reshapes social situations. Here’s a great recent example: a comic strip about cybersex from Penny Arcade. Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins (authors of Penny Arcade, if I’m reading their names right) can make regularly effective humour out of computing and videogaming situations because they live and understand heavily computer-mediated lives.

One of the few high-points of the first episode of The IT Crowd is towards the end, when one of the characters tells an inappropriate and somewhat touching story about the two male protagonists’ encounter with some prostitutes in Amsterdam, and it’s funny because of the human tragedy involved. It’s telling, though, that the situation has nothing to do with computers, and the writers generally seem most confident in the territory that has the least, directly, to do with IT. The jokes made at the company boss’ expense, for instance, are some of the more effective in the episode, and they are so because here the writers are making fun of corporate culture, not computer culture.

Jargon isn’t usually funny. Cybersex is funny. Finding out that a woman you met on an internet dating site is actually fat, or is really a man, is funny. Sending an email or instant message to the wrong person is funny. Getting trapped in the cable nest behind your tv (another Penny Arcade idea) is funny. Or at least, such things are funny in fiction, where they’re not happening to you. If The IT Crowd can show us how IT creates funny situations in life, rather than just asking us to look at nerds and laugh, maybe it’ll have a shot at being a success. Back to the drawing-board, guys: your current formula ain’t working.