SF fans have been, well, agitated about Charles Stross' blog post where he declares that he hates Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica. Doesn't seem to matter that he admits to have never seen the latter two or maybe that's just the first warning sign that while he has a point, he's taking it to ridiculous lengths. Yep, Star Trek has a lot of technobabble and usually ill-disguised t.b. at that. And yep most incarnations of Star Trek are mediocre at best, the original included. But it looks like Stross just wants to whine a bit. Just look at his comment 197 where he says B5 is a "FAIL" because each alien race has its own culture while humans have thousands. But does he really expect the show (or a novel even) to display maybe 15 cultures, giving three per race. Or should that be 1015 adding in the humans? Not really and clearly he's just letting his argument get away from him.
But where he's missing the point is that unicultured aliens and technobabble don't necessarily invalidate the story, even as SF. Just think of non-SF novels about culture clashes such as White Teeth or The American or Midnight's Children. They work just fine portraying just two or three cultures. And isn't all the nautical terms in, say, Moby-Dick or an Aubrey-Maturin novel just technobabble? Admittedly based on actual technology but for the vast majority of readers no different from dilithium crystals and actually far more confusing (and therefore a hinderance to the story).
There's no point reading too much into a blog post that Stross probably didn't spend much effort writing but he doesn't back away from it. The bigger issue that apparently eluded him almost entirely is that film & TV aren't the most effective media for SF, that they date so much faster than written SF but more importantly those forms of storytelling tend to downplay the very elements that make SF into SF.
The Funhouse Journal
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Couple of snide reviews
IO9 on FlashForward just about nails it ("Subtlety, thy strong point isn't FlashForward"). Be warned that this is the kind of review that's basically a synopsis with commentary (which sounds like a value judgement but is really just description). (Other people have pointed out how the kangaroo is equivalent to Lost's polar bear - apparently there's even an Oceanic Airlines billboard somewhere in FlashForward's first few minutes.)
MSNBC on the Fame remake is amusing and the kind of thing that seems deadly accurate even if I haven't seen the film and likely never will - didn't like the original so a watered down remake is even less appealing (and hey isn't that what Glee is for?).
MSNBC on the Fame remake is amusing and the kind of thing that seems deadly accurate even if I haven't seen the film and likely never will - didn't like the original so a watered down remake is even less appealing (and hey isn't that what Glee is for?).
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
46 Essential Rock Reads
Some LA Times bloggers recently came up with a list of 46 Essential Rock Reads that's pretty decent. (I've read 14.) No explanation of why 46 or even why various ones were chosen (they can't think Goldman's Elvis is actually good can they?) but still you could do far worse.
And of course the point for the rest of us is to show how knowledgable we are by pointing out the omissions so:
Geoffrey Stokes Star-Making Machinery: Inside the Business of Rock and Roll - A start to finish look at the creation and release of an album that's surprisingly remained unique almost three decades later. There are plenty of retrospective looks and some odds 'n' ends such as the documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster but this is a real inside look that should have inspired more.
Nick Tosches Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story - One of the key rock biographies that doesn't just make cultural connections but sees a big picture that most writers never even realize might be there.
Mark Shipper Paperback Writer: The Life and Times of the Beatles, the Spurious Chronicle of Their Rise to Stardom, Their Triumphs and Disasters, Plus the Amazing Story of Their Ultimate Reunion - A novel that imagines a different ending for the Beatles and in the process dissects and sorts through the concept of stardom. And then it closes with one of the saddest endings you'll ever read.
Dave Rimmer Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop - Maybe not rock exactly but pop dynamics have rarely been this exposed.
David Toop Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds - Even less rock here but a key work for wandering through sets of overlapping and conflicting ideas that motivated so much post-war music.
Bob Dylan Chronicles: Volume 1 - Isn't this far more important (and just plain interesting) than Tarantula?
And of course the point for the rest of us is to show how knowledgable we are by pointing out the omissions so:
Geoffrey Stokes Star-Making Machinery: Inside the Business of Rock and Roll - A start to finish look at the creation and release of an album that's surprisingly remained unique almost three decades later. There are plenty of retrospective looks and some odds 'n' ends such as the documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster but this is a real inside look that should have inspired more.
Nick Tosches Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story - One of the key rock biographies that doesn't just make cultural connections but sees a big picture that most writers never even realize might be there.
Mark Shipper Paperback Writer: The Life and Times of the Beatles, the Spurious Chronicle of Their Rise to Stardom, Their Triumphs and Disasters, Plus the Amazing Story of Their Ultimate Reunion - A novel that imagines a different ending for the Beatles and in the process dissects and sorts through the concept of stardom. And then it closes with one of the saddest endings you'll ever read.
Dave Rimmer Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop - Maybe not rock exactly but pop dynamics have rarely been this exposed.
David Toop Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds - Even less rock here but a key work for wandering through sets of overlapping and conflicting ideas that motivated so much post-war music.
Bob Dylan Chronicles: Volume 1 - Isn't this far more important (and just plain interesting) than Tarantula?
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Stupid Web Tricks: Slideshows
I'm seeing these with more frequency, the kind of thing where we're promised 10 Hottest Megan Fox Photos or 15 Best Serbian Horror Films but instead of a full list we have to click through all of them to even see what they are. Now the Fox Photos yep that will be clicked but most of us are going to start snoozing for other slideshows.
Recently I found one that shows what a bad idea this is. Foods Your Dog Should Never Eat sounds like it should be very important if you want a healthy, happy dog. But there's about 18 of these (the rest of the 27 slides are an ad and some further explanations) which means not many people will get to an unexpected one like #12 Persimmons, Peaches, and Plums because they will have lost interest around #6 or #7. (Well I lost interest around #2 but I'm guessing people who actually have dogs will be a tad more motivated, at least until they see it's mostly familiar stuff.)
So the slideshow design undermines the entire point of an article such as this. What most readers need is the full list and quickly find things they don't know or maybe more info on ones they weren't sure about. Instead the slideshow forces needless and counter-productive interaction.
But while I'm on this page might as well point out that the design clearly shows how little interest WebMD has in this article anyway. The actual text is far smaller than the accompanying photo, in fact is smaller than the adjacent advertisement. Looking at the entire page the text isn't immediately obvious but almost an afterthought (which might in fact be true).
The article itself doesn't live up to the title. The section about not eating raw eggs for instance is very clearly not a "never" item and the parts about sugar and fat are just ridiculous (and also not even remotely a "never"). So we go from genuine warnings about dangers at the start and end up with a cliched diet with fruits, vegetables and cooked rice, just the sort of thing that people who don't enjoy food push in the mistaken belief that it's more healthy.
Recently I found one that shows what a bad idea this is. Foods Your Dog Should Never Eat sounds like it should be very important if you want a healthy, happy dog. But there's about 18 of these (the rest of the 27 slides are an ad and some further explanations) which means not many people will get to an unexpected one like #12 Persimmons, Peaches, and Plums because they will have lost interest around #6 or #7. (Well I lost interest around #2 but I'm guessing people who actually have dogs will be a tad more motivated, at least until they see it's mostly familiar stuff.)
So the slideshow design undermines the entire point of an article such as this. What most readers need is the full list and quickly find things they don't know or maybe more info on ones they weren't sure about. Instead the slideshow forces needless and counter-productive interaction.
But while I'm on this page might as well point out that the design clearly shows how little interest WebMD has in this article anyway. The actual text is far smaller than the accompanying photo, in fact is smaller than the adjacent advertisement. Looking at the entire page the text isn't immediately obvious but almost an afterthought (which might in fact be true).
The article itself doesn't live up to the title. The section about not eating raw eggs for instance is very clearly not a "never" item and the parts about sugar and fat are just ridiculous (and also not even remotely a "never"). So we go from genuine warnings about dangers at the start and end up with a cliched diet with fruits, vegetables and cooked rice, just the sort of thing that people who don't enjoy food push in the mistaken belief that it's more healthy.
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson's 2005 novel (English translation 2008) received rave reviews (Amazon ratings four and five stars are 75%) though I'm not entirely sure why. It's a decent enough mystery with one protagonist a tad colorless but the other excessively colorful. In fact Salander tends to throw the novel off - smart only in very limited ways she has computer skills that might as well be presented as magic. Not just is she shown as being able to hack into pretty much any computer anywhere (the technical explanation seems just silly) but one key computer has so much material on it that even the characters remark on how implausible this is. (Should have been a red flag to Larsson.) But she's also smart only in a very narrow way and mostly amoral, helping to murder one person and torture another. I think these were intended to be accepted by readers because the first person was a "gangster" and the second had actually raped Salander twice but this is just revenge and not justice.
This second point may be why so many people give the novel a pass as being seriously literary. Larsson wants us to believe the book is saying something about abuse against women (in fact the Swedish title translates as Men Who Hate Women). He opens each section with an unsourced statistic about sexual abuse. The catch is that the resolution to the mystery is so excessively lurid that it shuts out any possibility of seriousness. I'm not going to reveal the resolution but while it could conceivably happen it's actually quite impossible. Salander's ambiguous status as willing victim (something one of the characters points out) and opponent of the rule of law only makes anything the book might have to say about violence even less reasonable. Another character speculates that Salander might have Asperger's Syndrome which just moves her into psychopathology - the more that she and the book's events are unlikely exceptions, the less the novel can deal with actual social problems. Many readers also claim the book is an attack on the wealthy or social criticism but again it's nothing of the sort. True it's wealthy and powerful who do the Bad Things in the book but Larsson makes no attempt to link what they do to their status - it could just as easily have been poor folk. (And in the real world, generally are.)
This second point may be why so many people give the novel a pass as being seriously literary. Larsson wants us to believe the book is saying something about abuse against women (in fact the Swedish title translates as Men Who Hate Women). He opens each section with an unsourced statistic about sexual abuse. The catch is that the resolution to the mystery is so excessively lurid that it shuts out any possibility of seriousness. I'm not going to reveal the resolution but while it could conceivably happen it's actually quite impossible. Salander's ambiguous status as willing victim (something one of the characters points out) and opponent of the rule of law only makes anything the book might have to say about violence even less reasonable. Another character speculates that Salander might have Asperger's Syndrome which just moves her into psychopathology - the more that she and the book's events are unlikely exceptions, the less the novel can deal with actual social problems. Many readers also claim the book is an attack on the wealthy or social criticism but again it's nothing of the sort. True it's wealthy and powerful who do the Bad Things in the book but Larsson makes no attempt to link what they do to their status - it could just as easily have been poor folk. (And in the real world, generally are.)
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Record Industry Lies Again
The Wall Street Journal discusses how claims of Michael Jackson's sales figures are waaaay out of line. Their estimates of sales lost to piracy or downloading have always obviously been far too high.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Kindle pricing & analysts
I recently saw some news pieces about Kindle book pricing based on a statement by analysts from a think tank called Bernstein Research. From the start this sounded odd - Amazon doesn't even release sales numbers for Kindle so how could anybody come up with good financials? Of course they couldn't and ended up either inventing numbers or analyzing available data, depending on how you want to view it. The only reason I'm spending any time on this isn't because it's important - the report is misinformed and will quickly vanish - but because it shows a type of thinking I see often in business world people where they base judgments on something they don't understand.
I can't find the original but the most detailed report is called Analysts: Kindle Book Price Hikes Are Coming. Interesting headline that's strictly accurate but not really true: analysts do indeed say that there will be price hikes but the force of the headline is that price hikes will happen when this is really just a guess.
Look at the first chart ("Exhibit 34"). Where did they come up with a COGS of 8.73 on a 9.99 e-book? At about 13% that's a much lower margin than a physical trade book which ranges from 40-46%. For all I know it's completely accurate (it's an open secret that e-books are artificially priced too low) but it doesn't seem right. What does appear wrong is that when they bump the price point up to 12.50 they increase the COGS. Why? Is it to disguise the fact that basically all the analysts are saying is that if you increase a selling price while maintaining steady costs then you'll have more profit? For e-books the cost should be fairly stable since there are no physical materials - in fact for Amazon the physical costs, warehousing, print run size, etc won't matter since the COGS is what they're paying the publisher. If the publishers are creating Kindle e-books then it seems as if the COGS could be whatever they want, even the standard 40%.
But then this doesn't even match the other charts. Chart two shows the same breakdown for the 12.50 book that's on the first chart but chart three for 9.99 shows different numbers. Chart three now has a 50% margin instead of the original 12.6% with no obvious reason except that it makes the publisher profits smaller than the first chart. Because if you use the original numbers then this calculates out to a 52% margin for the publisher, oddly enough exactly what the analysts say you'd get with the higher price point.
I can't find the original but the most detailed report is called Analysts: Kindle Book Price Hikes Are Coming. Interesting headline that's strictly accurate but not really true: analysts do indeed say that there will be price hikes but the force of the headline is that price hikes will happen when this is really just a guess.
Look at the first chart ("Exhibit 34"). Where did they come up with a COGS of 8.73 on a 9.99 e-book? At about 13% that's a much lower margin than a physical trade book which ranges from 40-46%. For all I know it's completely accurate (it's an open secret that e-books are artificially priced too low) but it doesn't seem right. What does appear wrong is that when they bump the price point up to 12.50 they increase the COGS. Why? Is it to disguise the fact that basically all the analysts are saying is that if you increase a selling price while maintaining steady costs then you'll have more profit? For e-books the cost should be fairly stable since there are no physical materials - in fact for Amazon the physical costs, warehousing, print run size, etc won't matter since the COGS is what they're paying the publisher. If the publishers are creating Kindle e-books then it seems as if the COGS could be whatever they want, even the standard 40%.
But then this doesn't even match the other charts. Chart two shows the same breakdown for the 12.50 book that's on the first chart but chart three for 9.99 shows different numbers. Chart three now has a 50% margin instead of the original 12.6% with no obvious reason except that it makes the publisher profits smaller than the first chart. Because if you use the original numbers then this calculates out to a 52% margin for the publisher, oddly enough exactly what the analysts say you'd get with the higher price point.
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