the tweney review

What happens if oil isn’t cheap anymore? Our farming and food systems collapse, the suburbs implode, a period of violence ensues, and in the end, we’re all living in small farming communities, riding bikes and milking cows by hand. So says James Howard Kunstler, who predicts this all may start to happen as soon as three years from now.

Ever since the end of World War II, we’ve embarked on this project to build ourselves a drive-in utopia — an economy based on suburban land development, eight-lane freeways lined with fry pits and hamburger shacks and a national big-box chain retail system. It has flourished because of two things: extraordinarily cheap energy and reliable supplies of it, and relative world peace. That has enabled big-box stores to develop 12,000-mile manufacturing and supply chains with the cheap labor overseas.

It’s 1:50.

Plus 1,439 other minutes–all illustrated with multiple photos–at the curiously engrossing Human Clock. A new shot every minute, of course.

Bodies embedded in plastic for display in San Francisco’s Masonic Center are now decomposing, while on display, and they’re leaking.

“The bodies were not degreased properly before they were filled with plastic,” says ABC News.

(via BoingBoing)

I’ve sat through Wagner operas that moved the plot forward faster.

Sure, the computer generated imagery is amazing–but overwhelming. It quickly become so ubiquitous that it’s no longer all that impressive (Coruscant looks a bit like Las Vegas at night, oh and look, here comes another floating droid), and without a really strong storyline, the story gets boring fast. The movie didn’t really pick up until 90 minutes in, when Anakin finally turns to the Dark Side. Eventually Yoda busts out some bad-ass Jedi moves, Obi-Wan and Anakin have a lightsaber duel over boiling lava, Padme dies, yadda yadda yadda, and we finally get to see the Darth Vader we know and love. Yes!

General Grievious — a hacking, coughing robot with a shriveled-up hot-dog for a heart? Kinda cool. But thank god there are no more of these movies planned, or we would no doubt be seeing a bad guy wielding eight lightsabers at once.

Sci fi author and EFF publicist Cory Doctorow (see my 2003 interview with him) has some good advice on writing. “Every morning I get up and I spend half an hour writing 250 words on the novel and a year later I have a book.” Plus three rules of thumb for novel writing:

“… at every turn of the book your protagonist has to try and solve a problem and that problem has to get worse through no fault of his own.”

“Think of any story, any narrative, as a journey during which someone’s emotional state changes.”

And, “… a story has some emotional impact on the reader. … your reader has to feel some emotion too.”

Wired News reviews Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good For You and wonders: If video games are making us smarter, why can’t we solve problems like Iraq and Social Security?

The answer’s easy: Make a killer first person shooter called Iraq: The Game and a gripping multiplayer online game called Social Security: Quest for Power. Make sure their respective universes are filled with realistic simulations and tons of real data. Then sit back and harvest the collective intelligence as gamers start playing through the simulations.

Update 5/31: Too busy to read Johnson’s book? The Guardian digests it. “This book is an old-fashioned work of persuasion that aims to convince you of one thing: that I am one of the most influential social commentators of the 21st century.” …

John Scalzi is not worried about the state of book publishing in an age of easily made, widely-distributed digital copies:

I write books, but you know what? I’m not a book writer, any more than a musician is an LP musician or an MP3 musician. The book is the container. It’s not destiny.

Want to know more about the business of writing, today and tomorrow? Scalzi nails it.

Whatever: Writing in the Age of Piracy

Just came back from a few days at E3, the massive video game conference that happens every year in Los Angeles. As usual, it was an experience in sensory overload that left me exhausted and slightly depressed by the end. A few things of note:

First person shooters are getting a little boring. Sure, the realism of these things is incredible now, and the Xbox 360 demos were almost cinematic in quality. But frankly, I’m getting kind of tired of gritty, dark visions of the future (or of 1940s Europe, or of the fantastical Age of Elves and Monsters) where all you do is blast people and things into oblivion.

One thing that would make me sit up and take notice: Corpses. In every one of these games, your enemies just evaporate after you kill them. I have yet to see a game where the bodies just pile up, and then you have to climb over them to get around. Now that would be gritty and dark. It would also add some realism to historical command & conquer strategy games. (A slight exception: in Grand Theft: Auto San Andreas, bodies lie there until an ambulance comes and carts them away–but they don’t present any kind of obstacle.)

The Nintendo DS, despite being a distant second to the Sony PSP in terms of console quality, is everywhere. They’ve sold 5 million of the things to date. I see them everywhere, and at the show, there were dozens of people — grownups — downloading Nintendo’s free games at the wireless kiosk, using their own DS systems. I have yet to see anyone in the real world playing a PSP.

The U.S. Army has its own video game–with more than 5 million downloads, it’s an incredibly popular one–and it was promoting the game with a big camouflage tent, and actual soldiers, stationed in front of the convention center. Talk about blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Hey kids! Hone your skills playing first person shooters–then join the Army and get a real gun!

The crowd at E3 is surprisingly diverse. Sure, most of the attendees were men, but there were more women than I expected (and I’m not counting the booth babes), and there were people of nearly every color, class, and style of dress. It was way more diverse than any computer convention I’ve been to. Cause for optimism.

Looks like Clara, who took a Sharper Image robot vacuum I was reviewing to preschool for show & tell, isn’t the only kid who loves to play with Roomba. And why not? Roombas are cute, unpredictable, a little bit scary (but not too much), and they’re vacuum cleaners–an endless source of fascination for many preschoolers I know.

Clara’s musical interests have shifted to Aretha Franklin — and now it’s “Respect” that she wants to hear, over and over again. “I want respect!” she says. Most of the time I’m able to bite my tongue, but once I couldn’t help myself: “Respect has to be earned, Clara.” Actually, I’m glad she’s demanding respect. And “Respect.”