Uncategorized

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After the World Didn’t End

Tom Bartlett followed a bunch of people who thought the world was going to end on May 21, 2011, from before the fateful date until one year afterwards. This story is as tragic as you might anticipate:

That intricacy was part of the appeal. The arguments were so complex that they were impossible to summarize and therefore very challenging to refute. As one longtime believer, an accountant, told me: “Based on everything we know, and when you look at the timelines, you look at the evidence—these aren’t the kind of things that just happen. They correlate too strongly for it not to be important.” The puzzle was too perfect. It couldn’t be wrong.

How to Create a Podcast Empire

Jesse Thorn walks you through the steps. Some of it is common sense, but it’s solid advice all around. Thorn has had a lot of success in the field, achieving what most podcasters can only dream about. I’d like to think that if I had made different choices (than the ones I’ve deliberately made), I might have established something comparable to the empire that Jesse’s created. But maybe I’m just kidding myself.

Plot Holes Big Enough to Drive a Space Ship Through

Frank Swain (via Annalee) does a spectacular job deconstructing the scientific flaws of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. SPOILERS in the article:

The scientific techniques carried out during the movie are a bit hit and miss. Conceptually, items such at the moving arm scanner on the hospital bed, and what I will only refer to as the “coin-operated vivisection chamber”, are ace, and a good extrapolation of emerging technology. They’re swish and smooth and white and very much like Apple products. And like Apple products, the people using them don’t really seem to know what they’re doing.

Cognitive Waste

How much time do we whittle away watching television? Clay Shirky (via Alex Micek) puts things in perspective:

[I]f you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

A Kirkus Star for The Dangerous Animals Club

The venerable Kirkus Reviews has reviewed Stephen’s upcoming book, The Dangerous Animals Club, which is an adaptation of the podcast that I produce with him, The Tobolowsky Files. They’ve also given it their prestigious Kirkus Star, which is awarded only to books of “remarkable merit.” Here’s an excerpt from their review [Subscription only]:

Tobolowsky contributes intriguing insights into the absurdities of TV and film production (his description of acting against a green screen is particularly amusing), the politics of graduate school life and the perils of pet ownership, endowing both the most mundane and rarified endeavors with equally close attention and appreciation. His reminiscences of the early days of the AIDS crisis and the decline and death of his mother provide the collection with profound emotional ballast, but even in the heavier sections Tobolowsky’s light touch and effortless empathy delight and sustain readers’ engagement.

A copiously examined life rendered with humor and heart.

May it be the first of many.

Is Dave Chen Still Alive?

There are many logistical challenges to moving across the country. One of them is the inability to bring your social network with you. I am blessed to have many friends in the Seattle area, but I am still new here and in the process of trying to integrate myself into the lives of those around me.

I occasionally worry about “worst case scenarios.” Like, what would happen if something terrible were to befall me? What if, God forbid, I died all of a sudden? How would it play out?

As a single guy living in a one-bedroom apartment, it would probably be days before anybody realized anything was wrong. To me, that’s an unacceptably long time for my corpse to lay in my apartment, unattended. “There has to be a better way!” I thought.

Thus, I bring to you IsDaveChenStillAlive.com.

The purpose of this website is to answer a very simple question: Is Dave Chen (me) still alive? The answer will either be yes or no, and is promptly displayed when you visit the website. How is this determined?

I discussed this project with my brother, Mike (a web developer) for quite some time. The way I figured it, I would log in to the website once per day and check some kind of box, confirming that i’m still alive. Mike did not think this was a good system. Here’s my reconstruction of our conversation:

Mike: Dave, you’re going to have to check this box every day for the rest of your life. Are you really ready to add this to your routine? Forever?
Dave: I’ve considered this, and the answer is yes.
Mike: This sounds like a terrible idea for many reasons.
Dave: Why?
Mike: Well, here’s one reason, and I’m just going off the top of my head here: what if you accidentally forget to check the box one day? Then people freak out because they think you’re dead. And then you need to re-assure them that you’re NOT dead. But then in the event that you ARE dead next time, people won’t actually believe it’s the case, thus invalidating the whole purpose of the site.
Dave: Well then, I’ll just have to work very hard not to forget.
Mike: That’s madness. I can easily come up with a better solution.

And he did! So now, every day, I receive an e-mail asking me if I’m still alive. If I click on the “yes” link, then the status quo is maintained. So really, if the site says “No,” then either Dave Chen is dead, or for some reason he did not have access to his e-mail.

So, IsDaveChenStillAlive.com! Bookmark it and you’ll always know the answer to one of my most pressing questions.

[Related: For those of you reading this also contemplate the journey to the undiscovered country, there’s a service called DeadSocial that will store messages to be delivered to your social networks until you die. Seems like a pretty cool idea, but I can’t say I trust any service with my deepest darkest secret messages, let alone one that will only deploy them when I’m dead. What if there’s a false negative, or more likely, an incident that causes an accidental message deployment? If you’re not dead yet, it could drive you to be!]

A Game of Podcasts

About 10 weeks ago, I started a Game of Thrones podcast with Joanna Robinson from Pajiba. Joanna has read all the books in George R. R. Martin’s series, while I have not. It took us a few episodes to really get down the format and get into the groove of interacting with each other in an entertaining fashion, but after recording a recap/review for season 2 episode 9 last night, I think we’ve finally nailed it. It’s been great fun to chat about this great show with a knowledgeable, articulate writer like Joanna and I’m impressed we’ve been able to crank out even half-decent episodes despite the fact that we’ve never met.

The podcast grew far faster than I could have possibly anticipated. To give you some sense of the scale of our growth, in less than 10 weeks we’ve achieved about 50% of the subscribers that it took the /Filmcast four years to achieve. Simply staggering.

But with success came a large number of haters, many of them on the /Film boards while others took to iTunes to leave negative reviews of our show (some while extolling other Game of Thrones podcasts). Many people accused me of disliking the television show, even though such an accusation makes no sense, even on its face (Why would I devote so much time to trashing a show I hated? Don’t I have better things to do with my time? Answer: Yes.) I shared my thoughts on these comments at the end of this week’s episode.

I’ve been podcasting for four years now and in that time, I’ve been subject to any number of negative remarks by listeners. I’ve always found various ways to deal with it. One of the reasons it hasn’t been difficult is because the proportion of positive/negative comments has always been something like 95% positive to 5% negative. This makes sense; podcasting is a medium that demands a lot of effort from its audience. Most people who don’t like a podcast simply don’t listen. They don’t return each week to complain. Some do, though. And apparently, most of those that do love listening to “A Cast of Kings.” The percentage breakdown for this show has been closer to 70% positive and 30% negative. For a podcast that’s just started to get off the ground, this is a huge amount of negative feedback to take in. This is one of the reasons I’m particularly vexed by the complaints about this podcast, as opposed to any of the other podcasts I’ve ever done.

On the last episode, I remarked that I wasn’t certain if I would return for next year’s show due to all the negative feedback and the ensuing stress. Since then, there’s been a deluge of fan mail, most of them praising the show and demanding that I not “feed the trolls” by listening to their critiques and quitting. I found the following e-mail from listener Chris to be particularly insightful. It doesn’t really say anything new or revolutionary, but it distills a lot of good ideas in a really articulate way:

I’ve been a listener to A Cast of Kings since its inception, and a fan of the /filmcast going back to the Kevin Smith/Dark Knight episode. I’m writing to offer my appreciation for the work you do, and to offer a theory as to why you receive the kind of personal criticisms from your listeners that discourage you from continuing to podcast. I suspect the kinds of criticism David receives, which are leveled at him personally, are rooted in the psychological nature of a certain kind of geek. Some of us in the geek community suffer from low self-esteem and a lack of self-actualization which has hampered our daily social interactions for our whole lives. People like this, who are insecure about their own identities and have no internal source of happiness, subsume their identities into their external sources of happiness: movies, TV, and other aspects of pop culture. As more and more people subsume themselves into a particular property (like Game of Thrones), they form communities of mutually-reinforcing dependence. Because of the nature of this relationship, any attack on the property will be conflated with an attack on their person. That’s why, when you offer a critical analysis of the property, they respond with a personal criticism. They’ve taken your criticism personally, and responded in kind.  As for Joanna, her greatest crime was analyzing GoT from a feminist perspective. Geekdom is a largely patriarchal community, comprised of men who have been made to feel insecure about their feminine sides by years of bullying, and women who feel the need to repress their femininity to conform to the largely-male geek community that would otherwise resent and shun them. The criticism of Joanna’s analysis is the same criticism feminists have been facing since the the women’s suffrage movement started in the 1840s. To both of you, all I can say is that there are those of us who really appreciate what you do. Every week, you produce amazing content. Every week, you celebrate the show we all love in the best way possible: by giving it serious thought. Challenging, intelligent, critical analysis is a rare treasure in this world. As a graduate student, when I facilitate discussion among groups of undergrads, I only hope to achieve the same level of discourse and reason that the two of you bring to my favorite TV show every week. Thank you for your insightful and impassioned analysis. Please continue to discuss Game of Thrones for as long as it makes you happy to do so, regardless of what the haters say. After all, despite all their hate, they continue to listen. So you must be doing something right.

As I’ve said many times before, podcasts are nearly always a labor of love and frequently hang onto their existence by a thread. There’s no reason for them to exist, other than that a group of people are passionate about a specific topic and want to let others in on what they hope will be an interesting conversation about that topic. In this instance, there’s no money involved, no benefit to status, no tangible rewards. Just the satisfaction that comes from delving into one fo the richest, most well-acted and visually sumptuous television shows on the air right now. Try to take away that satisfaction, and what remains?

I can’t promise that we’ll do the show next year because I have no idea where Joanna or I will be when Season 3 of Game of Thrones premieres. If I had to guess, I’d say Joanna will probably be eating caviar and drinking fine wine due to her newfound riches as a New York Times culture writer, while I will be subsisting off of offal in a ditch somewhere in Central Washington. But what I can say is that the e-mails I’ve received (and hope to continue receiving) have started to tip the balance and make me believe that this is something that’s worth doing. It’s a huge sacrifice in time and energy to record the podcast each week. But knowing that people are deriving some kind of enlightenment and enjoyment from it? There’s nothing finer.

A Smile to Your Lips, a Tear to Your Eye

Not too long ago, Joe Biden inadvertently spurred President Barack Obama into supporting gay marriage. Now, the video below has surfaced of Joe Biden giving a moving speech to a TAPS gathering about the pain of losing a loved one. Suffice it to say, my respect for the man has increased dramatically this past month.

I defy you not to be moved by this.