Moving from Blogger to WordPress

I recently moved this blog over to WordPress from Blogger (for a few reasons). I thought the process would be easy: Just download all the blog info from Blogger and use the Blogger Importer plug-in, right? Turns out, it’s a little more complicated.

I wish I’d read this helpful blog post by Ryan Sullivan, which outlines step-by-step what is necessary to make this move. Pretty much everything you need is there, but I did want to point out a couple of things:

1) One key step was making sure all my old URLs stayed the same, so that any links I received would still be valid. The thing I missed was that even with my new WordPress URLS formatted in the same way as new Blogger URLs, they still weren’t QUITE identical. For instance, a post on my old blog might have this format:

davechen.net/2014/10/why-i-helped-produce-layover.html

But now, that same blog post URL is formatted like this:

davechen.net/2014/10/why-i-helped-produce-layover/

Thus, all my old links were broken. My brother had to write a script that re-directed all old URLs to their new destinations. Blogger really killed me with those .htmls!

2) Adding open graph meta tags to WordPress is important for SEO/sharing purposes.

3) All my old images are still hosted on Blogger. This is okay, because at least the old posts still look the same, but it’s not ideal. For some reason my Blogger Importer did not download all the images to the new WordPress instance. I will need to figure out some way of managing this going forward.

Overall, the process just took a lot more work than I would’ve liked. But I think things are in a good place now and am pretty sure that migrating out of WordPress (should I ever want that) will be a good deal easier.

(Image by CollegeDegrees360, used under CC)

Thoughts on Nintendo’s Switch Announcement

Last night, Nintendo held a one-hour keynote to announce further details about the Nintendo Switch, its newest gaming console. Details had been scant since its teaser video back in October. You can watch the entire livestream of the announcement below.

Here are my thoughts on the main announcements, which included pricing (MSRP $299.99) and availability (March 3, 2017 in the US):

  • The launch lineup for this device is pretty rough. While the Zelda trailer was great, that game is also coming out on Wii U. It was also bit of a surprise that Super Mario Odyssey and Arms, which got significant airplay in the announcement, will not be launch titles.
  • Can launch title 1-2-Switch be as popular as Wii Sports in terms of getting non-traditional users into the gaming console space? Perhaps, but based on what they showed, it looked more like it should be a pack-in game and not something that you’d fork over $50 for on launch date. (And as my colleague Peter Sciretta pointed out, couldn’t this thing just easily be a free iPhone game?)
  • Many gaming outlets had run with a rumor that the Switch would be priced at $250. I have to say that the $300 price tag feels a bit steep to me for what we’re getting.
  • On that note: the pricing on the accessories is intense. $80 for two halves of a joy-con controller. $90 for a dock. These products are clearly where Nintendo expects to make a ton of margin.
  • The Switch will come with 32GB of storage and a 720p screen. Battery life will vary (dramatically) from 2 to 6.5 hours depending on the game you’re playing. That battery life number seems pretty precarious — two hours is barely enough to get out the door and through the subway. But maybe it’ll be enough for most people who are willing to bring a dedicated gaming device with them.
  • In terms of the presentation itself, it was both competent and unexpected, staid and bizarre. The interpreters varied in quality greatly (with one of them appearing to almost melt down completely) but I thought they did a good job overall. It was more about the potential of the Switch than what the product is actually launching with. My guess is that’s the right approach for the long term, but I’m not sure how much heat they’ll be getting at launch. We’ll see.

I also recorded some very rambling thoughts with a couple colleagues of mine yesterday, including Jeff Cannata from the DLC podcast. You can watch that Periscope here.

On the challenges the media is facing

Facts don’t matter. You can’t hurt this man with facts or reason. He’ll always outmaneuver you. He’ll always wriggle out of whatever carefully crafted verbal trap you lay for him. Whatever he says, you won’t be able to challenge him. He always comes with a bag of meaningless factoids (Putin likes to drown questions he doesn’t like in dull, unverifiable stats, figures and percentages), platitudes, false moral equivalences and straight, undiluted bullshit. He knows it’s a one-way communication, not an interview. You can’t follow up on your questions or challenge him. So he can throw whatever he wants at you in response, and you’ll just have to swallow it. Some journalists will try to preempt this by asking two questions at once, against the protests of their colleagues also vying for attention, but that also won’t work: he’ll answer the one he thinks is easier, and ignore the other. Others will use this opportunity to go on a long, rambling statement vaguely disguised as a question, but that’s also bad tactics. Non-questions invite non-answers. He’ll mock you for your nervous stuttering and if you’re raising a serious issue, respond with a vague, non-committal statement (“Mr President, what about these horrible human rights abuses in our country?” “Thank you, Miss. This is indeed a very serious issue. Everybody must respect the law. And by the way, don’t human rights abuses happen in other countries as well? Next question please”).

Source: A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media

Does Star Wars Take Place In Our Universe? 

Fun essay by the Cracked team, assembling evidence that Star Wars takes place in our universe.

It reminded me of this email below that we received from listener Rian on my Game of Thrones podcast A Cast of Kings. Worth keeping in mind when we watch anything that takes place “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”

David doesn’t make a big deal of it, but he keeps pointing out how they use “real-world” units of measure in this fictional medieval land. Fair enough, it is noticeable. However, he always mentions it in an almost snide wink to the writers, like he’s all-knowing, but all-forgiving of this, their minor transgression. He’s too smart to let it escape his notice but his beneficence is such that he will deign to suspend his disbelief. What’s worse is that the latest mention of it was in the context of explaining how Westeros is not medieval Earth, but an alternate universe.

In much the same way, I think he’s forgetting the fact that these folks aren’t speaking English. They’re speaking “Common,” and we are watching it from a Common-speaking POV. Perhaps he’s been spoiled by the Battlestar Galacticas of the world where we speed along someone’s dialogue and suddenly they throw us a “I’ll meet you in 15 centons” in the mix. “Whoa! You go, writers! It’s not English, it’s another language in a galaxy far, far away. You just blew my mind, dude!” But I contend that that approach is more flawed. It suggests that those folks are indeed speaking English and that if we were to suddenly materialize into that world, we’d understand everything but their units of measure.

On the Game of Thrones, it should make sense that the units they discuss are ones that we understand. It’s not that they happen to speak English. It’s that we happen to understand Common. Or, if you’d prefer, it’s as if we’re wearing universal translators. So when someone says “The Wall is 700 feet high” in Common, we’re able to understand the sentiment of the entire statement (including the relative height being described) and not a collection of the vocabulary words that happen to exist in translation. If you were a Common-to-English interpreter, and some Westerosi said “Targuna pon sanzu gabagool,” what good would it do to translate that into “The wall is 18 gabagools high”? Not too much. It’s a good thing we all speak Common.

p.s. Apologies to David. I know this comes across as more denigrating than it has to be, but it’s too much fun to take jabs at him. And that seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the show.

Inkoo Kang’s Takedown of ‘Silence’

Inkoo Kang rails against Silence’s unfortunate undertones:

At my first screening of Silence, George Lucas introduced Martin Scorsese’s new Japan-set spiritual drama at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre by praising it as a film that belongs in the 20th century. Whatever Lucas meant by that, Silence feels far older, even archaic, bemoaning as it does the arduousness of European colonialism. “It’s Hard Out Here for an Imperialist,” the period piece could be subtitled. Or, perhaps: “Sympathy for the White Devil.” That Silence asks its audience to care more about the narcissistic crisis of its Portuguese protagonist than the welfare of the 17th-century Japanese populace is howlingly infuriating and racially insulting.

See also: Jen Yamato’s excellent review.

I agree with many of the issues Jen and Inkoo bring up. I was quite torn about the film myself. You can hear my thoughts on the /Filmcast.

Nathan Rabin’s review of ‘Kanye West Owes Me $300’

Nathan Rabin reviews a book by someone who read one of Nathan Rabin’s reviews of his work:

In the section of my review of The Great Escape that Karp quotes in his book, I write that “Karl’s creative soul might not be worth the hassle,” a fairly brutal and heartless assertion (Jesus, it’s easy to be a cold-hearted fuck when you think you’ll never encounter the people you write about) he surprisingly agrees with. I would now like to take the time to say that Karp’s creative soul is most assuredly worth the hassle. It just took a different medium for him to fulfill his enormous potential. He took his overhyped nothing of a rap career and transformed it into the basis of a book that is something special. If that isn’t hip-hop, I don’t know what is.

Source: Jensen Karp’s Kanye West Owes Me $300 is a triumphantly funny look at failure