The second reason is that I hate politics and I don’t want this to become a blog where I ramble on about every little thing that happens in the dog and pony show that is the upcoming election. I said in my closing statement in that post that politics dirties everyone who touches it, and I stand by that statement at least. So, you can be assured that I will try to remain as moderate as possible in this matter as I can.

Allow me to clarify one thing, though: I was not censored and I did not receive even one request to remove the post. I chose to pull it voluntarily, because I didn’t think a cheap shot was warranted. I’m leaving up Wednesday’s post about the two bills, because that’s more representative of my true thoughts than a snarky wag of the finger. If more political reporting was that way– honest and fair instead of getting in every dig against “the other guy” as is possible– I’d feel a lot less antipathetic towards politics.

But since that’s never, ever, ever going to happen, I’ll just go back to my video games and television and leave the dirt to the experts.

Maybe I need to find some Bailout again and have that ready at a moment’s notice.

So, what all has been going on? Not a whole lot that’s of any real interest: work on Point of Descent is continuing apace, but is in that awkward “we’re working on stuff that we can’t talk about” phase; I’m involved with a few tabletop games with a very good group of players, but that’s a level of nerdery that isn’t conducive to blogging about just yet; I’m spending pretty much every Sunday on the Pitt campus dealing with work for Tekkoshocon; I haven’t had time to sit down and paint more of my Imperial Guard army because of all the other things I’ve been doing; and on top of all of this, my DVR’s hard drive failed and I lost a couple dozen hours of TV I was meaning to catch up on once PoD shipped. Y’know, the usual boring life stuff.

That’s the thing that I realized about the blog a few months ago. The reason I was able to do daily posts in 2007 was primarily because I really didn’t have much else to do back then, being still new in town and not exactly as outgoing as I am now. I still look back at that year not as a pinnacle or an apex, but rather as a starting point. I figure if I manage it every five years or so, that’s worth a shot.

So that means you’re likely to see some Bailout here and there, folks, and more than that you may find that some things that might be more suited to Facebook or Twitter wind up here. That, I think, is an acceptable trade off. I don’t care for social networking sites because I already do what they offer: I already have the means with which to curate content, I’m not restricted by any app or interface, and I’m not about to repeat content if I don’t have to. In the long run, the site is more about getting me to write as opposed to getting anyone else to read it. I make no secret of that and I expect nobody to be swayed by my arguments. If you are, then so be it, but that’s not my goal. If anything it would disappoint me– I’m not that persuasive.

That said, I hope at least to make a few people laugh. If that doesn’t happen, I’d consider it a real shame. ‘Cause what I just realized is that the majority of the posts from ’07 were, primarily, teh fünni. And I have a duty to teh fünni.

So, no more mister downer guy. Let’s get silly.

First, the reasons why I delayed getting an iPad haven’t changed. I still think that, by and large, it’s an unnecessary thing; I got by just fine with a laptop for mobile computing, and in truth your standard netbook is a bit more capable than the iPad by virtue of being easier to program for. A lot of the shortcuts I’ve found with this could be done, with a modicum of effort and time, on my existing MacBook. Of course, I can’t do coding work on the iPad yet, as far as I’m aware, and it almost certainly won’t run Crysis. It is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified large iPod touch. (I didn’t get the 3G version, which has as its primary selling point the fact that it is a glorified iPhone instead.)

That said, now that I’ve incorporated it into my daily thing, I don’t think I want to give it up, and in fact depending on the situation I’d say it could be perfect for a lot of people. Not everyone, mind you, but a lot. And the primary reason for this is mobility.

Most of what I’ve been using the iPad for has been content consumption tasks– getting caught up on forums, e-mail, Facebook, web comics, etc. Previously, my daily routine had me doing this at my main desk, in front of my computer. There’s a fair amount of inertia involved in that, and more to the point I tend to stand at my desk rather than sit down. Also, in the mornings certain functions take priority, putting the brakes on social activity, if you catch my drift. Being able to take a mostly fully-functional computing platform around the house gives me a lot more freedom than I had ever really thought possible; again, it’s doable with a netbook, but much less convenient.

As evidenced by this post, though, it is possible to do content generation on the iPad, and do it well. The wordpress app is iPad native, meaning it doesn’t look fugly when you have to scale up an image designed for a screen one fifth the size. Given the option to type out a post on the iPad or tap it out on the iPhone, the iPad will win out most of the time. Obviously if I don’t have room to set down the tablet and type naturally, the iPhone is a good choice… But in the end it’s missing the ease of use that having a full-size but virtual keyboard provides. Typing on the keyboard half of the screen does take some getting used to, but it’s hardly a hardship.

There are some pretty big drawbacks, though, and the steep price coupled with some decent competition from real Android tablets are just the tip of the iceberg. (I don’t count hacked-up e-readers or cut-rate “it runs Android… 1.crap version of Android, but it runs Android” devices as real tablets.). One of the big ones is that the old “file” paradigm goes away. I bought a rulebook PDF for a play-by-post game I want to start up, and it was delivered as a ZIP file, which the iPad kind of gags on. To extract it I’d have to connect to my computer– a minor hassle, but think how businesses send stuff, in particular tech businesses. ZIP is a pretty big standard and the primary operating systems all have intrinsic support for it. That’s just a symptom, though– file handling is done on an app by app basis, and there’s no “pool” space for files to live in. If you don’t have an app for it, you can’t keep it on the iPad. Transferring files is an arduous task requiring the use if an obscure and hard to understand panel in iTunes. It could be better. It should be better.

(EDIT: I have since figured out how to open ZIP files, but it’s still clunky and counterintuitive compared to the baked-in support OSX has had since 10.4 or earlier.)

I also am not enamored with the general fragility of the device. Granted, I haven’t been swinging it around like a cricket bat or anything, and in fact I put it into a military-spec hard case before I even turned it on once. I am not kidding you about that. But something this thin and light by itself cannot really be as tough as Apple claims it to be. The iPhone gets a pass because it’s mostly comprised of the thick glass for it’s front and back; I’ve dropped that onto tile and concrete multiple times and it doesn’t have so much as a ding on it. I am afraid that, if I dropped the unprotected iPad, it would die violently and spectacularly, then somehow resurrect itself and come at my throat with its own broken, mangled shards. Thus the case that doubles its weight and makes it look like the Speak and Spell from Hell. (The case is priced at $80. Christine, bless her heart, found it for $40. I wonder what truck it fell off the back of.)

Oh yeah, that keyboard? The case makes it slightly harder to type on it, as I tend to overshoots the space bar and hit bottom-row letters. Purely a synergistic problem and not one I’m worried about, as it will train out, but it’s annoying in the short term.

Overall, though, I still think the device is worth it. Annoyances aside, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, and the iPad has come to a point where the technology and apps are there to make it a more efficient alternative for tasks which would be a bit more time-consuming on a PC. It’s going to be my on-the-go platform of choice for a good long while now, and I’m rethinking my decision to swear off Objective-C and forego app development altogether. That’s the sign of a good device, in my opinion: when you start thinking about what you can do with it and not what you can’t. There’s a lot that anyone can do with the iPad, just like there’s a lot you can do with a Galaxy Tab, a Xoom, or a stock Windows laptop. I just happen to like the iPad.

I haven’t had a full post up here since late August, which should tell you something about the kind of September I’ve had. Here’s a hint: it’s been more than a little rough, both physically and emotionally. In between preparations for what I’m about to reveal, and work, and all sorts of other things, I’ve sort of run into one of those situations where I know, intellectually, that I accomplished a hell of a lot, but I still feel like the month was wasted. The fact that, over the course of the month, I watched upwards of a hundred hours of television may have something to do with it– but not that much, I don’t think.

So I suppose that’s as good a place as any to start. I made mention of this at the beginning of August, but I finished watching through the entirety of The West Wing over the course of September. I ran the numbers; for the full 154 episodes, that averaged out to roughly 120 hours. It was a lot of TV. I will admit that I wasn’t entirely focused on it at certain points; after Season 4, the show sort of went downhill until around the first quarter of Season 7. It was a great series, though, and I really recommend it to anyone who wants a closer look into how politics works.

Now, as to why I wasn’t paying attention for a season and a half. The big reason, and the thing I’ve kept under my hat for a good long while, is that I’m going to be moving very soon. As in, this month. I’ll decline to give an exact date, but the important thing to note is that most of my stuff is in storage, and the most valuable things have been there for a month or more. That in large part has contributed to the physical strain I’ve been under: most of my stuff is heavy.

It’s important to note, though, that once the move is done, and once everything is all set up and I’m all settled in, I think that the sense of accomplishment will finally come to me. Moving house is usually not a one-man gig. The fact that I managed to get this far more or less by myself is, if I could be permitted to indulge in a little self-aggrandizement, pretty damn awesome. I do, of course, have movers coming in to take the furniture to the new place when the time comes– I have limits, of course. But still, planning, managing, and executing this sort of thing on my own… It’s at once impressive and frightening.

Anyway. October’s going to be another rough month, but with any luck this will be the first in the unbroken line of posts leading to the end of the year. Tomorrow I think I’ll go over a bunch of the announcements that happened in September and some of the (very, very little) gaming I’ve been doing. Ciao, boys and girls.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep teasing you.

Anyway, despite today being a “rest” day, I spent a lot of time doing hard work on some household tasks that had fallen by the wayside, such as neatening up the living quarters and getting some clothes washed. I know, thrilling stuff. But this has cleared a lot of stress off of my general plate and has made me feel very, very productive and confident. Again, funny thing how getting stuff done makes you want to get more stuff done.

What this really means for the blog is that I’m going to try to budget my time a bit better in terms of having more than just three or four terse sentences for an update, and that this coming week I’m going to spend some otherwise down time writing up posts for… you guessed it, Essay Week 2010. I skipped ’09 due to a number of factors, but this year I’m fortunate enough to know when I’m going to have a gap, and I’m also lucky enough to see it coming more than an hour beforehand. In addition, Essay Week 2010 is going to debut something else I’d like to try out.

You can help select the topics for Essay Week 2010! I’ve got five or six ideas running around in my head right now as to things to write about, but if you’ve ever wanted to know my thoughts or opinion on something of interest to you, now’s your chance. Leave a comment to this entry, or send me a direct message on Twitter (or an @ reply if I’m not currently following you) with the topic you’d like me to address. Try to keep the topics at least PG-13 or lower, and please don’t pick something ludicrously polarizing or controversial. On Thursday, July 22nd I’ll pick the most interesting topics and write about them, interspersing them with the other essays planned.

Essay Week 2010 will run from Sunday, July 25th to Saturday, July 31st. Till then, please enjoy what I hope will be an elevated level of vocalization on this site.

Sue me, I read through an entire webcomic this evening to de-stress.

Let’s start with what I learned. Thing is, I cheated a little bit; I wound up having to drop the generic bit on my micro-blogging service because I realized I used that more as a direct communications tool than I initially thought. Most of my posts on that service had to be ‘branded up’ because they were recommendations to friends and so forth, and going generic would defeat the purpose of the message. I went as long as I could, and tried to keep things generic afterwards when they weren’t replies (such as the miniature painting progress), but that wound up being more or less a failure.

Although, I did realize that there’s a distinct difference between word-of-mouth support for a product or service, and false-grassroots “movements” in support of one. It’s probably unjustly cynical of me to presume malice or monetary impetus for anyone talking up something they like on the web or in real life, but sometimes it’s really hard to tell. In general, though, if someone makes a forum post about something cool they found, they’re not likely to be getting paid for it– particularly if it’s someone you know or trust. (We’ll set aside the issue of whether or not you can really “know” or “trust” someone you’ve only met online for now; I think everyone knows my stance on that, but as with everything it’s not a universal experience.)

Advertising in and of itself is not an evil thing; it’s just been so grossly misused and misapplied in modern society that it can get very overwhelming very quickly. To a certain extent I can sympathize with the views of folks like the Adbusters or their comrades in culture-jamming, even if I think they’re being just a tad bit too radical in their approach. It’s easy to say “f*** it all” and want to just withdraw from the commercial world altogether. Then again, that approach is dangerous as well.

Ads serve a twofold purpose. Their primary purpose in the world today is to garner sales for the product or service depicted in the ad (we’re assuming that the product or service actually is depicted in the ad– I’m looking at you, scuzzy pharmaceutical companies). However, their original purpose, and one which is more or less relegated to a side effect these days, is to inform the populace that a new product or service is available, and to tell the public about it. One can draw a distinction, then, between ads which serve primarily the first function– let’s call them “hypes” (as in Don’t Believe The)– and ads which primarily serve the second function– call those “dopes” (as in The Straight).

Hypes are everything negative associated with advertising. They’re glitzy, flashy, attention-grabbing or in some cases attention-arresting, and offer little to no substantive content. What content a hype may contain is either deceptive, misleading, or in some cases completely false. In computer terms, they’re viruses: they hijack a user’s computer for fairly small slices of time at a time to self-propagate and perform a detriment to the user.

Dopes are the more benign usage of advertising. They are detailed, specific, subtle or even understated, and tend to err on the side of the uncomfortable truth. A dope winds up being obviously an ad, but one that sometimes gets sought out by a consumer. In computer terms, they’re the documentation for some underused command-line arguments on a program: you don’t need it all the time, but when you do seek it out, it tries to present itself as the best solution to your problem, whether or not it actually is or you happen to have the problem it solves.

Modern ads can’t be so clearly and neatly divided into these two categories. How do you define, for example, a particularly pleasant earworm of a jingle? What about a dry, deadpan ad for a slimeball ambulance-chaser portraying himself as legit? Furthermore, the thought that pervasiveness equals success has caused most ads to shoot for viral status over being informative. Witness the titillating ads for a particular domain registrar that pop up every Super Bowl; how many average football watchers are going to give two rats’ asses what a web domain is? It gets worse in that hypes tend to be viral in a very literal sense, “infecting” consumers to the point that they themselves, either knowingly or unknowingly, start spewing hypes: commonly manifested as fanboyism.

I’ll freely admit to starting this month in anger and outrage, but the irritation was mostly with myself. It seems like I was constantly regurgitating the hype mill from some source or another without adding anything meaningful to the commentary. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that my decision on what to talk about and what I didn’t want to talk about was itself a form of commentary, and that most of the time, when I made a post about something commercial, I felt the need to make at least some brief (ha ha) remarks on it. A lot of my irritation was being directed at the aftermath of a few product revelations, or in some cases lack of revelations, that had been going on at the end of January, and as a result I found myself defending a position that wasn’t even mine to begin with. It turns out, though, that taking this month to reflect on my online activity and what I was posting did me a world of good.

It’s probably obvious by now that I’m going to start talking about commercial interests again starting tomorrow; I’ve already got the next three days’ worth of posts lined up, and that also includes two Game Clear notices (I’m skipping doing Save and Quit for those games). The thing is, though, you can count on the fact that all of what I discuss here is my genuine opinion. I’ve only been paid to promote something online once in my life, and I’ve made it abundantly clear what that thing was (also, my obligation to do so is probably long since expired) and didn’t proverbially pee in the well; so, honestly, this blog is what I actually believe. Warts and all, perceived fanboyism and all, it’s my opinion. I’ll try not to jump to the defense of companies in comments on other blogs, of course– if I see some flagrant stupidity or fanboyism, I still feel obligated to point out logical fallacies and inconsistencies at the very least– but I’m not going to censor myself just because I’m not being paid to promote something I genuinely like.

As a final little coda to this, remember that buyout plan I left open in the initial post? Yeah, nobody bit. I didn’t expect anyone to, of course, but it was worth a shot.