Greg Sanders

Review: The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen

"You know what a president actually is?" he asked. "An unreliable narrator."
"Really." She sensed a speech coming.
"He's the one who tells us how it is, right? And we fall for it, we read along with his story and let him construct the reality around us. We want to be entertained, soothed. Until one day, we hit that certain chapter, right, an suddenly we see the light and realize, Holy s***, we've been lied to the whole time. Reality ain't like that all. His story was bulls***. But by then, it's too late. We've all been suckered, and we just have to follow along with his little plot."

The Revisionists is a quintessential D.C. novel, from the setting to the fact that whole acts' titles refer to jargon such as 'green badges' in reference to contractors. This fact may be remarkable, given the sci-fi framing of a story about a man sent back in time to ensure that the right calamities happen in order to ensure his future. However, as Moti notes in his review, they don't really clash. I suppose D.C. takes all sorts from all places, so why should the future be any different?

The book tells the story of four characters, the aforementioned time traveler, an Indonesian maid, a lawyer who recently lost her brother in the wars, and a former spook now working for the aforementioned contractors. The first act, before they really become enmeshed in one another's stories, is somewhat slow going, leavened by the sci-fi storyline. Once they start interacting and complicating one another's lives by trying to do the right thing in a compromised way, the story kicks into gear. The characters all face alienation and come to realize that they aren't quite as clever as they think they are, but the book doesn't counsel despair so much as the realization that hard choices are not so easily dodged.

I think a real strength of the book is that it actually grapples with last decade as lived by many middle-class D.C. types. This isn't a war novel so much as a homefront novel, as the lawyer's loss of her brother draws her into becoming a whistleblower and the former intelligence agent recounts the story of how he was drawn into the national security apparatus because he found the world common to many literary novels to be unreal. This is a world of moderates making questionable decisions and leftists that are so far out of the system to be ineffective, with little middle ground. While the prose didn't always have me enraptured, I enjoyed the match between the conflicting viewpoints and think the story managed to be unblinking without being merely cynical.

I liked the ending more than Moti, although we both interpret a key ambiguity of the book in the same way. My only notable critique is that I think the decision to go with a possible tech transfer to North Korea as a key plot element was a mistake. The DPRK model is one with no appeal outside their borders; they offer neither freedom, nor growth, nor an appealing market for sales. I could see going with the PRC in the relevant role or an authoritarian ally of the U.S.  Not every element of the North Korean plotline was bad; one dark chapter told a story coming out of the DPRK that definitely added to the book. But I think their involvement undermined the believability of the villains as it makes them not just evil but also quite foolish.

Source: Moti, thanks Moti!

Purple Line Brochure ISSU brochure experiment (web version)

Purple Line Brochure ISSU brochure experiment (high-res)

Film Review: Les Miserables

We were pleased. Lowered expectations at the outset, based on criticisms from varying reviews, may have helped. Neither of us had previously seen a live production, although Kate had watched the 10th anniversary concert.

In general, I'd call this an actor's production. While there was spectacle, the director had a remarkable cast and emphasized that by making heavy use of close ups. The common observation was that Russell Crowe doesn't quite have the lungs for the traditional Javert, but he acted the role well. My favorite portrayal versus my beloved CDs was that of the urchin revolutionary Gavroche who had a few expanded songs and was very much a character in his own right rather than just a mascot.

I think the biggest risk the director took was being heavy-handed with his cinematography. There are a fair number of ensemble songs and the camera work, not just the voices, makes clear where our attention should be at any moment. I think that's simply necessary with disparate medleys like One Day More!, but I suspect those more familiar with the show might be a bit put off to not have the freedom to focus their attention as they like. I know I habitually pay more attention to the actors in minor roles when I've seen a play a few times.

From a political science perspective, I enjoyed Charles Walton's take in Foreign Affairs and do agree that it did have a notably pessimistic take on revolution. The revolt was exciting but from the size of crowds and the numbers of the soldiers it was easy to tell that they never had a chance.

"Hooper’s cinematic rendering is stunningly staged and brilliantly performed, but it cuts the author in half: it gives us the religious Hugo, not the revolutionary one. It tells the story of individual redemption through an odyssey of Catholic conscience, not of France’s collective redemption through political violence."

From a Kate perspective, the most entertaining part of the film is Enjolras' expressions as he listens to Marius moon over Cosette.  Our sympathies are totally with Enjolras.

Review: Twilight of the Elites by Chris Hayes

The book has already been ably summarized by Aaron Swartz over at Crooked Timber (worth reading the whole thing):

Our nation’s institutions have crumbled, Hayes argues. From 2000–2010 (the “Fail Decade”), every major societal institution failed…

Hayes pins the blame on an unlikely suspect: meritocracy. We thought we would just simply pick out the best and raise them to the top, but once they got there they inevitably used their privilege to entrench themselves and their kids (inequality is, Hayes says, “autocatalytic”). Opening up the elite to more efficient competition didn’t make things more fair, it just legitimated a more intense scramble. The result was an arms race among the elite, pushing all of them to embrace the most unscrupulous forms of cheating and fraud to secure their coveted positions. As competition takes over at the high end, personal worth resolves into exchange value, and the elite power accumulated in one sector can be traded for elite power in another: a regulator can become a bank VP, a modern TV host can use their stardom to become a bestselling author (try to imagine Edward R. Murrow using the nightly news to flog his books the way Bill O’Reilly does). This creates a unitary elite, detached from the bulk of society, yet at the same time even more insecure. You can never reach the pinnacle of the elite in this new world; even if you have the most successful TV show, are you also making blockbuster movies? bestselling books? winning Nobel Prizes? When your peers are the elite at large, you can never clearly best them.

The result is that our elites are trapped in a bubble, where the usual pointers toward accuracy (unanimity, proximity, good faith) only lead them astray. And their distance from the way the rest of the country really lives makes it impossible for them to do their jobs justly—they just don’t get the necessary feedback. The only cure is to reduce economic inequality, a view that has surprising support among the population (clear majorities want to close the deficit by raising taxes on the rich, which is more than can be said for any other plan). And while Hayes is not a fan of heightening the contradictions, it is possible that the next crisis will bring with it the opportunity to win this change.

My favorite points:

Meritocracy and Equality of Opportunity do not deserve the moral weight we give them:

Hayes draws on Robert Michel's iron law of oligarchy as an inspiration for his theory as to  why meritocracy fails:

"The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible. The Principle of Difference will come to overwhelm the Principle of Mobility. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: 'Whoever says meritocracy says oligarchy.'" p. 57.

In comments, people often say that the American system is not genuinely meritocratic. I put as much weight on that as those that say the Soviet Union wasn't really communist.

Meritocracy gives the education system an impossible task:

Freddie DeBoer further develops the interaction of meritocracy and education (note that I disagree with his conclusion in the piece on the grounds of practicality and desirability):

Because our system now depends on the idea that children are universally capable of being educated to certain necessary levels to benefit our economy. Globalization and neoliberalism — the basic economic consensus of policy elites — destroyed working-class jobs and incomes and sparked a furious attack on labor’s ability to unionize and collectively bargain for better conditions. Yet the neoliberal policy apparatus still needs a mechanism to improve wages for those at the bottom, in part to improve their living conditions and in part because the economy requires them to be consumers as well as producers. Having cut the legs out from underneath the traditional mechanisms of social mobility for uneducated Americans, the necessary step becomes plain: educate all of them. Questions about whether everyone can be educated to the necessary level cannot be countenanced, to say nothing of whether this system breeds zero-sum competition for limited “skilled” jobs.

Our vexed arguments about education reform stem from our refusal to acknowledge that we are constrained by reality, regardless of the needs of our economic system.

Matt Yglesias regularly notes the incongruity of teachers arguing that students' socioeconomic traits are the main factors determining their success. However, that is not primarily an argument that teachers don't matter; it is just an explanation as to why even good teachers cannot boost up their students sufficiently that education can get the median wage going again. Good teachers might be a jet engine lifting up students, but that doesn't mean they have the power to get them into orbit. This does not mean that money spent getting better teachers is wasted. I believe the marginal returns on education to be quite high; it just means that even valuable education reforms won't do for workers what strong unions once managed. I do think that DeBoer overstates the "zero-sum" nature of competition for skilled jobs. There are a fair number of skills still in fairly great demand that may not be able to replace the unskilled work of yesteryear, but are still at a point where adding a worker increases the demand for other workers. However, there are also fields like law, where the education system at large is rooking people into accumulating great debt for often dubious job prospects. I think that situation has persisted as long as it has because LSAT-ing your way to success is entirely in line with the myths of meritocracy.

Look for fraud, not bubbles:

Eager to avoid repeating their mistakes, many pundits constantly ponder whether this or that is the next bubble. Chris Hayes shows that why this is mistaken. The problem with the housing boom wasn't excessive enthusiasm, it was widespread fraud. The basis of the problem has been understood for centuries:

Thomas Gresham: "In this wild, unregulated monetary world, you had two different type of coins floating in circulation: "good" money, which was pure and properly weighted, and "bad" money, which was debased and did not contain the amount of it purported to contain. In such a situation people got pretty good at identifying what was good money and what was bad;  what they'd do was use bad money for exchange while having the good money. Eventually bad money became the only money in circulation… fraudulent actors drive out the honest if fraudulent actors receive no sanction for their action." p. 92-93

Hayes also notes this pattern in the steroid scandal in Enron, Major League Baseball and cheating under Michelle Rhee's education reforms in Washington D.C. (He contrasts that with Chicago where Steven Levitt was hired to monitor for cheating and managed to prevent widespread scandals.) Hayes cites William Black's description of these cases as "Criminogenic environments" where corruption became endemic. To me, the connection to bubbles is obvious, as providing an easy path to success feeds on itself and in business or financial sectors may redirect resources from legitimate enterprises.

The term Fractal Inequality:

It's a lovely term that updates what Lewis Carroll called the inner ring phenomenon. Status competition is like an onion: as you manage to break into one layer there's always another inner ring. What's changed in my view is globalization: elites now compare themselves to others at events like the World Economic Forum at Davos, not just those in the same town, state, or even country.

The book left me with three questions:

How important was globalization to this phenomenon? I think there is a cosmopolitan global elite in a way there really wasn't in prior eras. But even if I'm right, how big of a driver of inequality is this phenomenon? Similarly, what's the relationship between trade and inequality, and can trade deals be fashioned such that all the gains don't accrue to the top?

Do civil service barriers help? In the think tank where I work, the difficulty of corporate-government cooperation and of hiring government workers from the outside is regularly decried. This may lead to you correctly pegging most think tank as meritocratic (note: I'm speaking for myself here as always on this blog). But this leaves me curious: to what extent do civil service rules actually manage to put a break on the emergence of a meritocratic elite? Or have they been made obsolete by a churn of employees departing for better-paying corporate work and an increased reliance on contractors?

How does our present situation compare to pre-WWII history? I'd take meritocracy, with all its faults, over aristocracy in a heartbeat, although I suppose there's something to be said for competing sets of elites. Hayes does note that the meritocracy manages greater diversity than older forms of elite governance, but I'd be interested in a bit more history which might reveal to what extent the vaunted American 1950s were a postwar aberration or a phenomenon that had been replicated in other times and places.

Marylanders: Please tell Senator Cardin not to back down on stopping filibuster abuse

Update: The Baltimore office at least was closed on Thursday 1/3 but will be open tomorrow 1/4. The vote will be on [1/22], post-inauguration, although calling sooner is still probably better.

Senator Cardin apparently may be part of a bipartisan group opposing bringing democracy and effectiveness to the U.S Senate. In doing so, he risks blowing our one opportunity for the next two years to make progress. I had the alarm raised for me via email, but the story checks out according to Ben German of `the Hill:

A bipartisan group is offering Senate leaders a political compromise on filibuster reform as Democrats push to change rules that frequently require 60 votes to pass bills.

The group met Friday morning in the office of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, and plans to present its idea to the separate caucuses later in the day…

Lawmakers involved in the ad-hoc group, in addition to Kyl, Alexander and Cardin, include Sens. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and, according to The Huffington Post, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

The filibuster as presently constituted does not work with European style parliamentary politics and as a result the Senate can't get anything done. The alternative to an effective legislature is not some panacea of democracy: it is the accrual of power to the executive branch. This is true whether the President is Republican or Democrat.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is leading up a call drive to push for real reform; if you follow this link, they'll get you the phone numbers and information you need.

In summary, I'll hand the floor to Ezra Klein:

[The McCain proposal] is filibuster reform for people who don’t want to reform the filibuster.

In other words, it wouldn’t do much of anything. Unlike Sen. Tom Harkin’sreform proposal, it wouldn’t change the number of votes needed to break a filibuster. Unlike Sen. Jeff Merkley’s reform proposal, it wouldn’t require the minority to actually hold the floor and talk. And perhaps most importantly, it wouldn’t use “the constitutional option,” thus protecting the precedent that changing Senate rules requires a two-thirds vote rather than a simple majority.

If you think the Senate is pretty much working well as is, and the biggest threat are the folks who want to change the rules, then this is the proposal for you. It lets people say they’re doing something to curb the abuse of the filibuster without actually doing anything at all. But if you think the Senate is broken, there’s nothing in here that would even plausibly fix any of its problems.

If you care about this issue, please call soon.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman: Review

I enjoyed the language and the world of the Magicians, but I was left cold by the lead. Quentin was a privileged git who was realistically sketched, but who angered me with his judgmental moping. He's still the lead, but now that he's become one of the four rulers of the magical alternate dimension of Fillory he's actually grappling with how he should live his life rather than bemoaning his failure to find happiness. He also shares this story with the extended flashbacks of Julia, a childhood friend he left behind when he was accepted into the arcane boardinghouse Brakebills. She is now also a Queen of Fillory, but hers was a black market education, attained through hustling and without the safeguards of the academy. While her story is not without happy moments, the end of the flashback is enormously dark. The end to the book I will not spoil, but I found it far more satisfying than the ending to the Magicians which notably suffered in its final chapter.

In enjoying the end, I disagree with Alyssa Rosenberg (important spoilers abound) who has an excellent suggestion for a narrative change to the final chapter, but finds that Quentin's changes are largely derived from Julia's suffering in an old and unfortunate trope. I think multiple reasons are established, but I don't have much to add beyond what I put in the comments on her blog.

I would recommend the book to anyone who enjoys Grossman's writing and characterization, even if they weren't fond of some of the characters in the Magicians. The thornier question is do I recommend the pair of books to someone who has read neither? While my endorsement isn't as strong as Moti's, I'm going to go with a hesitant yes for fans of modern world fantasy and stories that lean heavily on the interior lives of their characters. On the latter point, it may be simplest to just check out the first book and read a chapter or three. If you don't get the urge to quote lines to other people in the room, then put it down and don't look back.

Source: Recommended by Moti and checked out by Kate from Howard County Libraries, thanks to all three.

Quick Review: Hamlet's Hit Points

Hamlet's Hit Points by Robin Laws is a book that proposes a system for analyzing fictional works as if they were story-oriented role-playing games. The core system is breaking the story down into beats which involve procedural and dramatic ups and downs for the protagonists. There's more breadth than that summary implies, but on the whole it's a fairly simple system and along with the commentary is definitely inspirational. The phrase 'hit points is more there for alliteration, the system does not examine any such values for characters but instead looks at the ebb and flow of their fortunes.

Are you interested in the theory of RPGs? If so, do you think of the system as primarily a conflict resolution mechanism in a cooperative game? Are you unsatisfied with your ability to emulate some of your favorite stories using present tools and want to understand the why (if not necessarily the how)? Then I'd say buy Hamlet's Hit Points. It's a fairly swift read, available in print or a variety of electronic forms, and a fairly unique form of criticism to boot.

For more, including applicability to running RPGs, check out the Hamlet's Hit Points entry on the Inherent in the System wiki.

[Updated: Grammar fixes.]

The U.S. Assault death rate is remarkably high

Thankfully, things do seem to be getting better on the overall assault death score. Nonetheless, it's vital to remember that the problem we face is far larger than even the terrible heart rending massacres. The chart below from Keiran Healy includes all assault deaths with gun deaths being a key driver. Of course, guns are not autonomous drones, they don't kill people of their own volition. Instead guns make it easy to kill people.

Ezra Klein has a good round up of facts about gun massacres. Whenever one of these occurs, you see suggestions that the solution is more guns. If that were true, wouldn't the U.S. be safer than other countries because we already have so many guns? Gun massacres, while being increasingly common in the U.S. still make up only a small percentage of the total annual blood toll our gun culture charges. At best, suggestions that we arm everyone would decrease the number of guns massacres while increasing the number of routine assaults which would naturally up the death toll.

But what about Switzerland and Israel?

Ezra Klein: Israel and Switzerland are often mentioned as countries that prove that high rates of gun ownership don’t necessarily lead to high rates of gun crime. In fact, I wrote that on Friday. But you say your research shows that’s not true.

Janet Rosenbaum: First of all, because they don’t have high levels of gun ownership. The gun ownership in Israel and Switzerland has decreased.

For instance, in Israel, they’re very limited in who is able to own a gun. There are only a few tens of thousands of legal guns in Israel, and the only people allowed to own them legally live in the settlements, do business in the settlements, or are in professions at risk of violence.

Both countries require you to have a reason to have a gun. There isn’t this idea that you have a right to a gun. You need a reason. And then you need to go back to the permitting authority every six months or so to assure them the reason is still valid.

The second thing is that there’s this widespread misunderstanding that Israel and Switzerland promote gun ownership. They don’t. Ten years ago, when Israel had the outbreak of violence, there was an expansion of gun ownership, but only to people above a certain rank in the military. There was no sense that having ordinary citizens [carry guns] would make anything safer.

Switzerland has also been moving away from having widespread guns. The laws are done canton by canton, which is like a province. Everyone in Switzerland serves in the army, and the cantons used to let you have the guns at home. They’ve been moving to keeping the guns in depots. That means they’re not in the household, which makes sense because the literature shows us that if the gun is in the household, the risk goes up for everyone in the household.

Lincoln: Review: A good film about Lincoln and Congressional politics

As is often the case, I found that Alyssa Rosenberg summed things up nicely.

Lincoln is at its most clear-eyed, and its most-effective, when the movie tackles the question of how to muster votes, and bipartisan votes at that, for the end of slavery, a section of the film dominated by Stevens and Secretary of State William Seward (David Straitharn). The two men begin the movie in very different positions, Stevens as a life-long advocate for the end of slavery and racial equality, Seward unconvinced of the Amendment’s viability or necessity. “Since when has our party unanimously supported anything?” he asks his president, particularly given the prospect of the South suing for peace. “Why tarnish that luster with a battle in the House?” But Lincoln makes himself clear: he will have the Amendment in January of 1865, even if it means buying off lame duck Democrats who need employment when they leave their offices in March. “If procuring votes with jobs is what you intend, I’ll procure from Albany the skulking men who are suited to this shady work,” Seward tells Lincoln, resigned to his task.

I think that there is a fair case to be made that it doesn't do a great job telling the larger story of abolition as with the exception of a great corporal at the start, the African American characters are often passive in an ahistorical manner. However, the film is called Lincoln, after all. It might be best viewed with Glory for the time being although I think there's also room for a great film about abolition.

I actually would prefer to be writing about how I liked the film's portrayal of politics: rough and tumble at times but also requiring genuine skill and yet historically offering a means for progress. I think it also did a reasonable job of depicting politics in wartime. Corey Roberts above cites some unfortunate statements by Tony Kushner; I thought the film itself fairly clearly favored pushing for the 13th Amendment even if it meant possibly delaying the end of the war and the subsequent death toll at Petersburg. I also thought that the relationship between Lincoln and Stevens was one of the more interesting ones of the film and that it noted the importance of principled radicals in politics even if arguing that at times they should compromise if only for appearance's sake.

However, I think the importance of African American contributions, which the film points to at several times but does not accord a main role (e.g. one that could be filled by Fredrick Douglass) deserves enough mention that I'm closing by linking to Ta-Nehisi Coates' discussion of the Civil War as having three factions. The reason I think this is so vital is that the Civil War, the war to end slavery, is often used as a moral benchmark when considering other wars. However, our use of it is highly damaged if we forget that slaves and freemen and women were vital to victory. It was not a humanitarian intervention on their behalf; it was a war that they vitally committed to the extent they were allowed to do so.

Update: Kushner clarified his meaning in a manner I found quite satisfying and in keeping with the film. I don't want to endorse his viewpoint necessarily, but it's a perfectly reasonable one. It also was in keeping with my reading of the film.

Deadly Premonitions: Horror Game Critique

Deadly Premonitions is a trailblazer. The genre is a new medley: open-world horror. I'd say the medium was No More Heroes driving and Laura Bow (or Sleep No More) adventure games voyeurism on a bed of a Shenmue style of world. The feel was David Lynchian, I think; I'm not actually a big David Lynch fan. I saw Inland Empire with friends for much the same reason I played this game and I'm glad I did but I haven't felt any desire to repeat the experience.

So why play the game? Well, it's more fun than the one David Lynch film I've seen. That doesn't compel you? Well try this on for size:

So who should play this game (or more likely wait until March 2013 to play the director's cut)?

 

Skyfall quick review: Variations on a theme

My friend Omar's immediate response to the film was that it evokes the Bond franchise more than the past two Daniel Craig films. I had replied that for me it evoked classic filmmaking more and thus early Bonds.

However, on further pondering, I do think that it did quite clearly pick up themes toyed with by both Goldeneye and Die Another Day as well. Alyssa Rosenberg has a review that covers most any point I'd like to make, and I'd emphasize her mentions of the National Gallery and Severine.

So what to add, I think I will wander into spoiler territory here:

1. As an international relations type, I should mention that cyberwarfare does not work that way.
2. I did not actually find M's are you afraid speech especially compelling. Well delivered to be sure, but the 'everything is cyber' parliamentarian is rather a strawwoman. I'm not really sure what real world argument the film tracks to if any.
3. However, I think the choice of strategy at the end was interesting and telling. Bond went low tech and low armament to fight on home turf instead. That strategy worked to minimize the civilian and police casualties that had been ramping up earlier in the film. That strategy was also effective, albeit with a real cost. It was a choice I found to be more interesting than the earlier debate.
4. Wonder how this film plays in the Scottish independence vote. Interestingly enough, Bond tends to say England rather than Britain, despite being born in Scotland. I have no special insight here, I'm just curious.

As for the review, if you enjoy Bond films or action heavy spy films, I suspect you'll find this quite satisfying. I've drifted away some from the genre over the years and that doesn't seem to be changing, but this was still a fun visit for me. I feel the film respected me and  merits some respect in turn. Finally in Bond's first confrontation with his nemesis he used a line that will enter the top 10 Bond quotes.

Where to watch the Maryland Voter Initiative Results

The board of elections is reporting with regular updates.

I should have remember that myself, but I got the link from Maryland Juice.

[10:16 pm] Addendum, county status page, to tell who has reported so far and thus who has left to report. Numbers for Montgomery are 68 out of 238 which is good news as the marriage equity question is scarily down to 51%-49%.

[12:39 Maryland Juice is calling it a win as is Maryland for Marriage Equality! We're at 940,507 for and 895,573 against, probably a few hundred thousand more yet to be added.]

Marylanders, please vote for question 6

For those that are undecided, perhaps because of the warnings of pastors, I'd argue that it's key to realize that this measure is about going to the court house, not the chapel. It's explicit in the language of the bill. Whether churches choose to recognize the marriages is left to them.

Obviously, those provisions haven't completely allayed the concerns of some religious groups. However, I'd still ask you on a personal basis to support it.

My marriage was only possible because a gay friend introduced my wife and I. For that reason and many other reasons, he was my best man at my wedding. We both gladly attended his subsequent marriage and the stable, loving example he and his husband set a positive example for other couples. This should be no surprise, friends in loving stable relationship are regularly an inspiration. The reason this issue has gained public support so quickly is that same sex marriages succeed, and fail, just like any other marriages. When the match is right, they can bring a lot of good to two people and those around them, and more or more people have had a chance to witness this phenomenon. To know gays or lesbians that have been able to gain formal recognition for their relationship is to know that there's nothing to be afraid of. At the same time, denying these civil  rights makes the lives of such couples unnecessarily hard by blocking benefits, visitation rights, and all the other little things our society grants in recognition of a couple that have chosen to commit themselves to each other.

Please vote yes for 6.

I'm schedule[d] to be on 1500AM Federal News Radio this afternoon to talk about Defense Contracting sometime after 3

Along with DIIG Assistant Director Guy Ben-Ari, the plan is we'll be speaking with Francis Rose about trends in defense contracting. It may be around 3 p.m. but no promises.

If you'd like to listen online, it should be live steaming from the Federal News Radio site.

[Update: The archive is available from Federal News Radio]

Extra Lives by Tom Bissell: Review

Tom Bissell's recent post on Dishonored reminded me that I should stop taking the easy road with books I had mixed feelings about and actually review something I loved. His book Extra Lives qualified. This review comes perhaps a bit late, even the backlash against Bissell, or at least his imitators, is now a fading memory over at Critical Distance. Nonetheless, I devoured his book of essays about video games and I  wanted to specify why.

First off, the man has style. The book's nine essays each using a different game as a framing mechanism and say something different about the medium. It is perhaps warrants a demerit that he tends to write about his experiences with games rather necessarily critiquing them in the manner of a game designer, but I think that better positions him to write out about larger questions that designers by necessity put aside. The most extreme example is the essay that ends the book and is available from the Observer on Grand Theft Auto and Cocaine, but this book should not be mistaken for a memoir and while that essay entranced me when I first read it, it was not my favorite.

What drew me to the book was Bissell's firm command of why I enjoy game but also why they are problematic. Even most of the best games often use violence as a crutch and have their stupid moments. As a English major, he naturally has a particular interest in those games with poor writing, but he also works through the wide array of reasons for that. Comparatively few of them, at least amongst the better games, could be solved simply by hiring more and better writers. That said, he certainly does not wish to abandon story:

Yes, as difficult as it sometimes is to believe, games have authors, however diminutive an aura he or she (or frequently, they) might exude. What often strikes me whenever I am playing a game is how glad I am of that hovering authorial presence. Although I enjoy the freedom of a games, I also appreciate the remindful crack of narrative whip–to seek entertainment is to seek that whip—and the mixture of the two is what makes games such a seductive, appealingly dyadic form of entertainment… I want to be told a story, albeit one I happen to be part of an can affect, even if in small ways. If I wanted to tell a story, I would not be playing video games.

Ultimately, the book raises more questions than it answers and undercuts itself with harsh realities nearly as often as it enchants. That is inevitable, it is the state of the medium. When he does provide answers, I don't even always agree them but perhaps especially when I disagree I feel I've learned from grappling with his suggestions.

The book helped me work out my theory of why I rather enjoy videogames, as well as various forms of RPGs that Bissell was not trying to address but that he speaks to even so. They give experiences, a chance to test out strategies towards living, try out paths not taken, or better yet chase down dreams that were precluded by detail birth or utterly impossibly to begin with. When other players are involved, some of the weaknesses fade away as there is another human that can react directly to the ways you try to affect the story and that can shatter the pleasing illusions of uber-competence bred by single player, particularly when quick loads are at hand. Travel appeals to me for much the same reason, I find that to be a more fulfilling habit on the whole, but also a far more expensive one. Thus, as for my favorite games, I must agree with a line from chapter one: "It was a an extra life; I am grateful to have had it."

The Magicians by Lev Grossman: Critique

[Updated with valuable comment] The Magicians is a literary novel about a boy who discovers that he's a wizard and goes off to an exclusive magical academy instead of college. Capfox gets at what's best about the book (read the whole thing):

If you've heard about this book, you've probably heard that it's like Harry Potter or Narnia but more grown-up, where grown-up is generally taken to mean it has more drinking and sex. And to a certain extent, that's true: our hero, Quentin Coldwater, finds his way out of a normal, humdrum life he's unsatisfied by, and into Brakebills, a magical university where he makes new friends, masters a lot of magic through lots of discipline and hard work, and has a variety of adventures. And yes, there is drinking and sex. You can see where the comparisons came from…

The writing is fluid and evocative, and there are definite deconstructions and take-offs from Narnia and the Harry Potter books. The characters are well-sketched, for the main ones, and are complex enough to feel both likable and not likable at the same time. The choice of themes and the building of the relationships really resonated with me. It took a bit for me to get set up in the story and feel attached to everyone, but I ripped through it afterwards. The very end part of it was a bit odd, as it didn't feel as earned as the rest of the story, feeling more like a sequel hook, but I'm very much looking forward to reading the sequel, so I can't punish it too much. In fact, I think I will go start that now.

For me, the end of the novel was actually an anti-sequel hook. The main character, Quentin, was often pretty unsympathetic and while that turned around some during the finale the last chapter settled my opinion that he was an entitled prig and the chapter before that wasn't so much better. That said, I do agree on the writing; I found the characters plausible and the world well-thought through, although your mileage may vary there as it left a writer friend of mine cold.

In any event, my big problem with dear Quentin is that he wasn't ambitious enough to be a failure. Life keeps handing him prize after prize and he makes no real effort at contentment nor chasing a greater good. Alyssa Rosenberg points to the lack of career counseling, and I suppose that's true enough, but it seems to me that by the time you get to college you should have picked up that once your subsistence and higher needs are covered you should make some effort to help people or otherwise make the world a better place even if it doesn't get you the crown of a magician king. I know lots of bright people that I see parts of in the book, including myself, but they all managed to at least make a good faith attempt at enjoying their circumstances and/or pursuing a vocation. As for Quentin, I feel like those ridiculous schools that try to ban the Potter books should instead substitute The Magicians; it might be a far better way of convincing children that magic is a tool of an entitled elite that's everything that's wrong with America.

I'm somewhat curious about The Magician King. I liked some of the ensemble - admittedly most of all those who came to bad ends [with one notable exception] - and I found the portrayals empathetic and the language alluring. But unless the proletariat of the Narnia-analogue have a chance at revolution against these privileged bright young things, I will come away most dissatisfied.

[Comment from Mai-Anh on my Google Plus feed: "In the end, I liked it better once I reframed it to look at Quentin not as a hero or even a protagonist, but as the "representative symptom", almost." I completely agree. I'm not sure to what extent that was what Grossman intended but he did reveal just how entitled Quentin was in a variety of ways, most notably the reappearance of a character who wasn't so lucky/skilled as to make it into Brakebills.]

Death Note Manga: Critique

Death Note's core starts with a fairly simple premise: A top high school student named Light comes into possession of a notebook with the power to kill anyone he wants, as long as he knows their name and face. He uses that ability to kill those he deems criminals, choosing most of his targets based on the television news. He is soon opposed by L, a mysterious master detective facing a particularly daunting challenge as Light's supernatural methods are exceedingly difficult to trace back to him and have an initially unknown methodology. This challenge is compounded by the fact that Light is quite willing to kill anyone who gets in his way, a murderousness limited only by his desire to avoid raising suspicion to himself.

This is a rather well known series, which is part of the reason I read it. I worked through books 1-7 (of 13) because Kate was going to donate them to the library and I was curious. The writing does make for an effective cat and mouse thriller, there's a nice ensemble of supporting male police officers, and the character design is quite effective at differentiating the players, which is vital when dealing with a more realistic setting. That said, I was content to skim at points and to stop reading after a logical breakpoint in book seven. See subdee over at Hooded Utilitarian for a trenchant critique that does reveal the ending.

The key excerpt:

There was so much bad faith moralizing in that series. A single sociopath high school student was going to make the world a better place by killing already-apprehended criminals, who were waiting in jail for their sentences to be decided, using a magic notebook. This would deter other criminals from committing crimes, leading to a better, crime-free world. Because it’s the countries that have a transparent, (semi-)functioning justice systems and active, (semi-)free cultures of journalism, that report on crime and imprison criminals according to the rules of law, that are the worst off, am I right?

The thing is, while Death Note did a pretty good job of painting Light, the [megalomaniacal] serial killer high school honors student who lucks into the possession of an instrument of mass murder, in a negative light (because power corrupts and only the corrupt seek power), it didn’t really have many characters who were much better – who were morally upright and competent.

Light's plan was incredibly simple-minded while surrounded by incredibly sophisticated measures to save his own neck. I think the book failed to address, in even the most general way, the second-order effects of such a campaign on criminals and the issue of wrongful accusation. Nonetheless, like subdee I think the series has its points. It does a fairly effective job of being a thought experiment on the dark instinct that 'we just need to kill criminals'. The series answer seems to be "I'll do you one better, let's have one of the smartest guys around implement your clever plan and see how it works out." Turns out wielding that sort of power unchecked makes you a monster even if you stay somewhat sane and that when ideological allies gets involved things get very messy very fast. Similarly, the characters with consciences will line up against that plan and be willing to risk their lives to stop it. I think this may be diluted by later manga - from what I understand of the actual ending it probably could have played out with serious time skips in the back half of book seven - but there's no real point commenting on books I haven't read.

That said, I have largely lost my patience for characters that are extremely clever about manipulating convoluted rules that are specific to the novel or series. The final Harry Potter novel was particularly bad about this when it came to wand rules. Death Note isn't quite as bad; it sets up new rules every chapter with key ones coming in place well before they get used, but I still just stopped caring about the new rules and Light's elaborate explanations of how effectively he exploited them. No doubt he's a terrific rules lawyer, but I only give big points for cleverness when there's a simple set of starting rules or the rules have some metaphorical or literal basis in the real world. To be fair Death Note actually pulls off most of its cleverness without relying on rules of transfer and its use of memory loss led to a great plotline with a sympathetic Light.

In the end, I think Death Note 1-7 delivers on its cat and mouse thriller promises. That said, if you already get that it's wrong as a general rule to go around killing criminals, then I'm not sure there's much to learn from it.

Source: Kate, thanks Kate!

This blog favors voting for Obama and moving to a primarily criminal-justice/intelligence approach to anti-terrorism efforts

On my Google Reader feed, I’ve recently noted my agreement with voting for the Obama administration even if you have a variety of legitimate critiques against them on foreign policy militancy or war on drugs grounds.

Four quick reasons: the President has respected our status of forces agreement with Iraq and withdrawn from that nation, the President opposes waterboarding and Gov. Romney does not, the President is far less likely to launch and ill-advised strike against Iran, and on domestic policy grounds while Obamacare, which Gov. Romney has promised to gut, needs to go much further it is still the greatest advancement of the U.S. social safety net since the sixties. On top of this, I’d add that I am unaware of any civil rights issue on which the Republican candidate is better than the President.

Nonetheless, this should not to be taken as a statement of support for our drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen. Similarly, I’d favor working out a status of forces agreement that could pass muster in the Afghan parliament, and if that means accelerating our withdrawal or reducing the amount we operate outside of bases before that withdrawal, so be it. Obviously, there are many on the left that are more vehement on these issues and I respect that. I’d encourage the American citizens among them them to vote for the President, eyes wide open, but I respect if they wish to criticize U.S. policies and withhold/retarget money/labor from campaigns as a means of applying pressure. The lesser of two evils argument just applies to voting, trying to use it to squash reasonable foreign policy criticisms is illiberal.

Towards that end, here’s a Kevin Drum post on some of the civilian deaths that inspire that criticism. He calls attention to one particular poor practice that is escalating the number of these casualties.

It appears that drone activity has declined in 2012, although that may be an artifact of the time it takes to gather data. Aside from the raw numbers, though, Glenn draws particular attention to this passage from the report:

The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school. Waziris told our researchers that the strikes have undermined cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals.

…There's no question that fighting a counterinsurgency is hard. And it's fundamentally different from fighting a conventional war because it's difficult to separate militants from civilians — something that insurgents explicitly count on. But even if you accept drone strikes as a legitimate part of counterinsurgency, and even if you accept that civilian casualties are an inevitable part of that, "double tap" strikes are simply heinous. They're also far more likely to turn the indigenous population against you, which makes them counterproductive as well as immoral. After all, it's not as if top al-Qaeda leaders are the ones likely to be conducting rescue operations. At best, you might get a few foot soldiers but nothing more.

Again, the whole post is well worth reading and brings more data to bear (go to Greenwalt or the recent drone report for even more). So I support dropping the ‘double tap’ strike immediately and moving away from a war model. Obviously, the criminal justice model failed to prevent 9/11, but the best response there is to improve the model rather than adopt a military one. The initial military approach cost more American lives, let alone hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, than were lost to Al Qaeda. The drone war approach does have far fewer deaths associated with it than the occupation approach, but Osama Bin Laden is dead, al Qaeda is not the force it once was, and it’s time to end our wars. As Drum notes this is hardly a popular position, but it is not going to get more popular unless we talk about it.

Usual caveat, speaking for myself, and not my employer.

Exciting challenges without combat in tabletop RPGs

Dungeons and Dragons, and thus many subsequent RPGs, had their origins in war gaming and traditionally combat is the most mechanically interesting and supported part of many systems. However, I get tired of the emphasis on violence but I still do want genuine challenge, I'm not just playing for a good story. The trouble is that a wide variety of scenes that are exciting in films and stories from heists to set pieces that don't involve combat but that just don't seem to translate well into RPGs. I've long been interested in the topic and tried various experiments, but thankfully this isn't a problem that's just of interest to me. Inspired by a Narrative Control podcast, I've made up a wiki page about the some of the unconventional conflict implementations out there and what common principles they share. I created the wiki because I want to keep this page updated as I learn more about some games and try new ones.

Principles derived by Narrative Control guys.

• Unified Conflict System: They don't list this as a trait, but the non-combat system should use the same sort of rules as the rest of the game.
• Teamwork: Avoiding the classic thief/hacker problem where once character is the only one doing anything. This is often called the rogue or the hacker problem, but it could happen any time on character is the best at something to just have them do everything.
• A Hit Point system: Both the challenge and the characters should have some sort of tracking system as this allow for building tension.
• Both sides must threaten each other: Rather than being a static obstacle the storm or the lock should be attacking the characters. In several systems this is done by doing the same attack, finesse, and maneuver system that is used by the characters.
• Offering Variety: While multiple iterations are key for raising tension, it shouldn't just be the same thing over and over again, as that's boring.
• Cool losing conditions: If losing means blocked progress or all the characters dying, then the stakes often don't feel real. In combat, this is handled by running down resources, which only partially translates over to other sorts of challenges.

I try to apply this approach to a range of games, including some that the Narrative Control team didn't cover. Check it out.

Review: Guidebook Android App for 2012 Otakon

Are you the type that's always desperately searching through a convention/conference schedule? Hopping from a panel to a screening in search of a free seat or more exciting content? Addicted to your smart phone and wanting to apply it to ever more aspects of your life? Then I heartily recommend the Guidebook Android app. It may also be available for the iPhone; I haven't checked.

I'll be attending Japanese anime/manga/culture convention Otakon this weekend up in Baltimore and downloaded the app after hearing about it from Omar. It has exceeded my expectations: the schedule is searchable, you can easily add and remove events from your own personal schedule, and it even offers reminders. However, the best part is that it seems both fast and robust. Even the slightly clunky bits, like the listings for fan parodies and AMVs which presumably had to be updated at the last minute, aren't really a problem.

While I'm writing this up in the context of Otakon, I think I'd find it handy for professional conferences as well.

Feature for which I'd be willing to buy a premium version: The main additional feature I would like would be the ability to share schedules and maybe check-in to events. I'd put my price point for such a feature at $5 for a premium app or the like. I some how doubt that there's enough demand to make it worthwhile, so for now I'll appreciate the features that are there and try to remember to "like" my favorite panels as I go.

Sleep No More (3 of 3)

After wandering away from the bar, my last hour began watching a scene in a bedroom and coming to the increasingly strong and eventually undeniable realization that there was a secret passage in the room. I feel a little silly in my hesitation to use it; the elevator operator introducing us to the show encouraged boldness and if the chance to follow a secret passage isn't the time to be bold, I don't know what is.

That said, this was perhaps my most conventional hour. This definition of convention includes nudity, male nudity at that, so worry not, we're still talking experimental theater. However, I have taken to heart out of context advice from over at L'Hote: don't be afraid to do something even if it might make you look like a stereotype or a naïf. So, after my sojourn through a hidden gateway I resumed exploring and travelled down to the lower levels of the Hotel. There's a grand ballroom that was at the time of my arrival functioning as Birnam Wood. Rather cleverly, the ballroom is surrounded by a balcony which makes it one of the better spots for mass gatherings and having one's choice of multiple scenes. Passing through the mobile forest, I walked into an altar to see MacBeth praying. Rest assured, his dear wife soon arrived to put a stop to that in a manner that was perhaps more vampiric than traditionally seductive.

While both impressed me - playing the dead as MacBeth did briefly can under circumstances look as challenging as playing the quick - I chose to follow Lady MacBeth into the ballroom as she readied the space for a dance. That proved to be one of my more memorable choices, as she came walking in my direction and after I made one small step out of the way I realized she was headed towards me rather than past me. She took my hand, stroked my palm briefly, gave it a light kiss and then closed it around nothing at all. This is not one of the vaunted one on one scenes - the cast do choose people for simple interactions as I witnessed a handful of times later that night - but I'll admit, the odd sensation of interacting with a character probably hooked me into seeing that particular plotline through.

If you don't know the rest of the tale of the Scottish play, you probably shouldn't hear it from me. Suffice to say the cleaning off of blood was handled quite well and left MacBeth as exposed as his wife had been earlier, but for him it was at a far lower point in his life. The downside of following one of the main plots is that there are far more observers about, but the principles made use of all of the space available to them and I never felt crowded out of the action. The show ends as the ghostly guests are gathered together, for a scene that I'm told plays different for the final iteration of each set. We were then let out to live music at the initial bar to discuss what went down and gird ourselves for the long trek back to Brooklyn.

So after that show, my main gameplay tip would be to focus on big picture exploration. I might also recommend leading off with a more conventional experience of picking an actor or perhaps an object to follow and then setting of on your own after you come to recognize a few more of the players and how they fit together. On a more practical note, a watch that lights up can be quite handy and contacts are to be preferred to glasses if at all possible. Finally, I largely avoided spoilers, but if you're likely to only go once it may well be worth finding some online playbill or the like. I generally found the experience was enhanced when I knew who someone was. For tips on performing well as an observer and getting a one-on-one scene you'll have to go elsewhere, but I think it is safe to say that being an active observer and being quick to follow things that catch your eye is quite often rewarded.

Source: Bought my own ticket, but only made it up because Matt suggested it and did most of the driving. Thanks Matt and thanks Brainy Gamer for initially piquing my interest. Also, thanks to Ian and Kris for the lodging!

Sleep No More (Part 2 of 3: Here there be spoilers)

At midnight, the story began anew in the Hotel McKittrick. I was wandering the third floor cemetery and discovered that pointing statues are oddly capable of evoking my fear. Perhaps because I was never certain that there would not be a living statue - a legacy of too much D&D and the odd street performer I'm sure - and because of a sense of dread at what they might be pointing out. The ambient music largely heightened the effect, although the number that Lady Gaga sampled to start the extended video for Born this Way may have subsequently lost its power to frighten me. Regardless, the musical cue and the actions of my fellow masked guests drew me to the main bedroom of the MacBeth's.Continuing into what might be considered spoilers, a nurse came in and prepared and laid out a dress for Lady MacBeth by the bath. Multiple copies of a letter were also left waiting for her, describing the recent good news her husband had received. Or at least that's what I thought it said; cursive has long been my nemesis and the darkness doesn't help, but a working knowledge of the Scottish play will do wonders.

The Lady's scene left her quite exposed physically as she prepared for her bath and emotionally as she danced with her joy at her husband's advancement. Upon his return the mood stayed celebratory for a time, but again through dance they argued and made up, came together and clashed. I am no connoisseur of dance, but could pick up the gist of scenes in plays I knew, even when they weren't necessarily occurring in order. Similarly, while the show made some use of side rooms guarded by black-masked staff, the sheer agility required to run dance scenes amongst observers is truly impressive.

As the MacBeths went about their business, I decided to go exploring and went up to the fifth floor: the hospital and forest maze. The hospital itself was quite fully-realized, although I don't think it drew me in quite as much as other settings. I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect both from personal experience reasons and because they are a common setting for survival horror, few of my favorite stories or moments have taken place in such. Watching the nurses was interesting; they had their own fairly creepy routine which was fun to watch in short snippets but I wasn't tempted to follow them. That changed when I was walking in a room with cut pages hanging off lines of strings, taking up much of the corner. I had studied them for a time, not divining their meaning, when a nurse walked in and revealed several of the secrets of the room. Even better, she then proceeded to the forest maze, climbed through a gate, and found a fellow nurse in a locked hutch in the corner of the maze. While this was happening the number of people observing the scene steadily increased - big moments typically happen in accessible spaces - but witnessing the prelude made it all the more thrilling. I have no idea what any of it meant, but watching the dance of the two nurses was the weird and wonderful moment that most defined the show for me.

Satisfied with my exploration of the fifth floor, I proceeded back to the fourth, where the elevator first let me off before I chased after an actor. This was the town of Glen Gallows which was home to a number of small shops and two rather different classes of bar. A second of hesitation in following an action scene I stumbled across cost me the chance to witness an interrogation scene, but there was some consolation in wandering into Hecate's Bar and witnessing a dance by the character known as the sexy witch. This was followed by an encounter between two characters that was almost normal by comparison and a valuable reminder that when sharing a drink with a suspicious person, make sure they take the first sip. Subsequently, I enjoyed the puzzle-solving satisfaction of helping fellow observers try to piece together a torn-up note. I never actually pursued this strategy, but I do wonder if following items rather than people might be a good way to learn more about how the various stories interwove.

I'm not sure of my timing, but I think around this moment, the the clock struck one and the final hour began.

Sleep No More: In which my adventure gaming heritage distracts me before midnight (part 1 of 3)

Sleep No More is a form of theater as immersive setting: actors rush between intertwined stories while visitors navigate the ambient gloom. It takes its inspiration from Macbeth and Hitchcock's film version of Rebecca, but the real romance of it is getting to see a play where the backstage is just as fully realized as what is typically shown to the audience, a sort of survival horror version of the conceit behind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The audience members all wear white-beaked Venetians masks, ones that may startle you if seen in the mirror and that helps your fellow voyeurs fade into the background as ghosts of lesser importance.

The nominal Hotel McKittrick, location of the show, is in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The show is up to three hours, but you may need to arrive well before your ticket time in order to get that early call to the elevator. The check-in process was pleasingly efficient; the coat check fairly mandatory if you have any bags, but it would be a good idea even if it wasn't. The hotel lounge was a fully realized velvet room that left me vaguely apprehensive that the protagonist from Bioshock would be bursting in at any moment to slaughter us all. The bar is a pleasant place to wait for your card to be called, and you do want to be called earlier. The start times are necessarily variable to avoid overcrowding but the end time is fixed. We arrived at the hotel at eleven and discovered a substantial line; I think I made it to the show itself less than a half hour before midnight.

The elevator let me off on the fourth floor, the town of Gallows Glen, and I looked around a few of the rooms before I gave chase to an actor who went flying through to the stairway. I successfully arrived at the places of rest floor (bedrooms and a cemetery), but I lost the actor. Exploring the bedrooms was an excellent consolation prize as they managed to be creepy using a variety of approaches from bizarre to insidious. Some of the advice I heard suggested treating the Hotel McKittrick as an adventure game setting (sans kleptomania): appreciate the amazing staging by rooting through drawers, glancing through books, and seeking out what is hidden. However, while I found little details like an array of letters scribed on a bedframe, I came to reject that strategy. If a letter, a mirror, or a wardrobe draws your eye, by all means take a closer look, but unless you've planned multiple trips there is far too much going on to spend time on a pixel hunt. Instead I alighted to the cemetery which soon enough led me to my first scene.

2012-06-30 Journey to the Northwest

We were extraordinarily lucky in our vacation timing, as when we left the D.C. area there were temperatures above 100 degrees and thunderstorms causing widespread power outs. During the first few rainy days locals were apologizing for the weather; we gladly informed them that no apology was necessary. Our flight out to Seattle was straightforward; the only point of note is that this was my first flight where Southwest had both the technical capacity and legal authority to offer wifi on the flight. I passed on this revolutionary opportunity as I didn't feel like paying the fee, $5 if memory serves, although some future flight will no doubt dun me for my internet addiction. The airport itself was a bit more exciting as we got our Seattle transit smart cards:  One Regional Card for All (ORCA). That said, we misused our Orca cards on our maiden trip and managed to miss the validation stations. We felt chagrined about that we docked our cards on the way out rather than the way in.

We used a Budget rental car place off 4th Street; it was a great location and we were relieved that they let us immediately leave our car in their garage as parking in Seattle starts at $4 for a half hour. We walked over to the Seattle Public Library on advice of Kate's coworker. The design is quite distinctive and modern with curves on the outside and any number of observation points and views out as well as towards the often open architecture on the inside. My favorite gimmick was the book spiral, depicted on the left. The hallway gently ramps letting bibliophiles walk through the entire Dewey Decimal System without needing to use stairs or elevators.

After seeing the library we walked down to Pike Place Market, known for its fresh fish and produce and thus quite a pleasing olfactory experience. We bought groceries and flowers and walked by the shops on the lower level. Kate was excited to see the original Starbucks, although she put off her pilgrimage through the line until later in the evening when the line was shorter. After seeing the market we enjoyed a late lunch at the nearby Crepe de France, which surprised us by the ampleness of their entrees. Our lodging was a timeshare in Birch Bay, some hundred miles to the North near the border, so we did not stay too late in Seattle. The journey up was  beautifully adorned by fog which clung to the hills in a manner that I found difficult to capture on camera despite reminding me of Kurasawa films.

Review: Founding Farmers in Rockville

My family went to Founding Farmers near Rockville a month or two back for the first time. It's a chic new chain known for its emphasis on organic and local produce. It can be rather busy on a weekend afternoon. We'd made a reservation but despite accidentally arriving rather early we had to wait to be seated until a bit after our reservation time. Similarly, we waited for forty-five minutes for our entrees to arrive; that was partially due to a miscommunication about whether we wanted beignets as an appetizer or dessert but was still a bit frustrating. Our one other problem was the noise level; the place is fairly wide open in a way that makes conversation more difficult without the benefits of live music or the like.

Those complaints aside the food and drink were both quite good and did live up to the promised local and organic appeal. I thought the entrees ranged from good to great. Portion size was variable, my grandmother's macaroni and cheese was overly abundant by my mother's dish was a bit small. Also I did like that that the standalone meals weren't too expensive; the costs come more from the enticing selection of drinks, appetizers, sides, and desserts. I don't think all restaurants need to do that, but I like when the more frugal and the more extravagant can dine together without too much fuss.

All and all, not a bad experience, but I'd recommend sticking to times when they're less busy.

The line holds and the ceremony of innocence lives another day

The Surpreme Court  decision on universal health care was a frightening near thing. Four justices voted to find the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional and appear to be preparing a judicial assault against the New Deal. Chief Justice Roberts decision stepped us back from the brink of a Supreme Court legitimacy crisis, a change made perhaps at the last minute, although still a decision that will complicate future efforts to improve national programs that are implemented through the states.

The battle now proceeds to the election. This will be a hard one, thanks to difficult worldwide conditions and successful obstructionism by Republicans in Congress since the beginning of the crisis, economic recovery is slow in coming. As Dan Drezner notes, the U.S. is performing above par internationally, but the average American voter doesn't grade on a curve. I have no special insight into how to win that election so instead I"ll look at the topic of how did we win this round?

To answer that question, I turn to Will Wilkerson, a libertarian with liberal sympathies, who seems scornful of the win in a way that strikes me as informative:

Mr Roberts observed the livid reaction to Citizens United, as well as the liberal freak-out over the mere possibility of a ruling striking down Obamacare, and determined that prudent custodianship of the court called for a light, conciliatory touch. Indeed, my hunch (and none shall doubt my amazing intuition!) is that Mr Roberts may well have chosen to join his conservative colleagues had the court not lost so much public goodwill following the Citizens United decision…

Thus, all that was required to avert a looming "crisis of legitimacy" was to uphold Obamacare, for whatever reason, and Mr Roberts seemed to have known it. Mr Chait and his partisan allies clearly dislike the way in which Mr Roberts avoided the "crisis" of their collective tantrum, but the great relief that has now washed over them will be enough to keep them from attacking with full force the "bizarre and implausibly narrow reading" of the commerce clause which Mr Roberts just embedded more firmly in constitutional law.

This is a tradeoff I will gladly take. Achieving universal healthcare is no mere battle in building a more humane, it is the war. As Kevin Drum argues, the distinction between activity and inactivity never came up before and is unlikely to come up again. The practical result is that we will have to call things taxes in the future, scary I know, but the present Democratic party aversion to ever using taxes is on any but the top 1% was already unsustainable. We may yet lose the election, but Roberts had the votes to end it here and now via what James Fallows called a slow motion coup and he choose not to. We are a better country for that and we are a better country because liberal politicians and pundits were taking Michael Tomasky's fine advice and preparing to come out swinging. As Wilkerson notes, this wasn't a one off preparation either, the vehement reaction against Citizens United may not be enough to  overcome the effect of big  money donors but it did better prepare us  for this fight.

In some ways, this recalls the bully  pulpit strategy of presidential leadership: appeal to the public to move popular opinion and pressure members of the legislature. Political science has not found support for that idea. However, in part because supporters are defending an existing law rather than trying to institute change via the court, vehement arguments seem to have helped win the day. I'll keep an eye out for any further research on this matter, as I expect the minority mentioned above will be back for future attempts to roll back the welfare state.

Usual caveat: Speaking for myself, not my employer.

Review: Half Revolution

Half Revolution tells the story of a group of friends living near Tahrir Square at the start of the Egyptian Revolution. They all have strong ties to Egypt, although they do represent a mix of nationalities. The story they tell is an interesting one: they are quite supportive of the revolution and do go out into the streets; however, their role is unsurprisingly more that of the documentarian than the full-on revolutionary. This isn't to say that even though they eventually leave, they aren't taking real risks when they're out filming. One of the group  is beaten by Mubarak's thugs and all of them become increasing fearful as the hardliners take the streets near them.

Note at the start that I do say it is the story of the friends, not the revolution. This isn't to say that they don't try to tell the story of the revolution; they get the reactions of people on the street and do get footage of the action. However, I think the cosmopolitan nature of the group of filmmakers works  against them to an extent as the full story of the revolution ultimately belongs to those that couldn't leave. Similarly, while we got a variety of expressions  from people on the street, we didn't get much in the way of interviews with key leaders or representative samples.

This not to knock the filmmakers. I think they had two choices: to go with a short  film, perhaps less than a half hour, that just told the story of the revolution and relegated themselves to full observer status, or to tell their stories, which does add to what we know about what happened while also giving us characters to relate to a sense of the fear they were working under. Directors Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim have done Egypt a service in my view and may well represent the start of what I suspect will be a larger phenomenon of filmmakers with the necessary talent and skill to record events that they happen to be on scene for. Likely, future key events may even have multiple such filmmakers on hand, and they will have the option of working together to give an even wider lens to such key events.

Photos of Tahrir Square and the burned National Democratic Party headquarters by myself and my mother. Available under a creative commons license.

Source: Silver Docs Tickets from my mother. Thanks Mom!

Review: Tea or Electricity

The documentary opens on the mountain village of Ifri in Morocco. There's minimal agriculture and no industry of note: mostly breeding and herding of livestock with some collecting of nuts and timber. We soon cut to a government crew coming out to the village after stopping in the market of a nearby town stocked with consumer products likely in their second or third lifetime. The government electricians make it out to the village with some difficulty - the last part of the journey is on foot - and tell the residents that they'll be back to bring electricity when the seasons allow. They don't have time to stay for tea, but do have the opportunity to hear that while electricity is fine what the residents really want is a road.

My mother and I wanted to see this film after witnessing a similar tale in Egypt. Director Jerome Lemaire's motivation was similar but much more audacious; he went into the extraordinary four-year film project after observing the electrification process in other places. As you might guess, getting on the grid has a wide variety of implications: it requires improvements to the road with free labor from the villagers, it adds light to the nights and learning to read need no longer be done by candlelight, cell phones become a practical possibility albeit with poor reception, television arrives and with it knowledge of a wider world and consumerism, and the minimum expectations for life change as even the poorer residents add a few light bulbs. Part of what makes this story fascinating is that the people of Ifri are not naïfs; the men of the village are well aware that change will come and that some of the changes will exploit them. One of the residents and more interesting characters argues for bargaining for lower prices and no flat fees by adopting village-wide solidarity as he has heard has been done elsewhere but there's few takers.

The film is done in the modern style where the director takes a light hand and his voice is rarely heard except when he's asking the locals questions. I think this approach works well, as we get a fuller picture of the villagers in their own words and it greatly reduces the temptation towards didactic story-telling. I'd say the only weakness of the style is that it denies us some pieces of the larger context and at times reduces the amount one can learn from the first viewing. Seeing a map would allow us to better track the villagers use of local government equipment for road building and track the progress of the electrical towers. An interview with electrical officials would reveal that the villagers are right and that the electrical project will pay for itself from the government's perspective after five years of use, a fact that only came out during the Q&A. Finally, name and date overlays would help us track a wider range of villagers and better understand the pace of change. That said, I think it can be reasonable to use footage out of sequence, so perhaps clear divisions between the four years would not have been possible.

This film is effective, well-organized primary source material; it allows anyone interested in development see it in progress in a way that even many field workers may miss. Just imagine gathering footage over four years in a village that lacks electricity! For me the key takeaway is that this is how a transition from a informal economy to a formal economy works. The villagers of Ifri ended up trading their labor to make infrastructure improvements as well as some of their farm animals to pay the connection fees and buy light bulbs and such. Poorer villagers could effectively  get discounts, not just by having fewer light bulbs but also by doing some of the installation work themselves and by disguising their limited ability to pay as long as they could. The rural poor often have more localized assets than you might imagine - that's a good part of why they haven't left for areas with better condition - but in the Q&A Lemaire said that he expected with the arrival of television more of the children would head to the cities to get work. That said, the downsides of rural life are not glossed over: we see funerals during the film and the work of the parents, both male and female, looks arduous and in the long term backbreaking.  I'd gladly see a sequel to this charming, humorous, and often lovely film that looked at what happened over the next four years to Ifri after the initial glow of the television had faded.

Source: Silverdocs tickets from my mother. Thanks Mom!

Image credit: Promotional poster taken from Cinenews.be. Remaining photos are of electrification in rural Luxor, Egypt. They were taken by myself and my mother, available under a creative commons license.

Review: Harold Goldberg's All Your Base are Belong to Us

All Your Base are Belong to Us is an interview driven account of the rise of videogames. Each chapter focuses on a small set of key figures or companies and tells their story in a manner that reminds me of long form pieces in the Washington Post's Business section. I don't think it breaks new ground when it comes to well known feature such as Nintendo's Miyamoto, but most of the industry does not hold such a celebrity status so I learned more even about companies and designers I'm quite familiar with. For those that aren't newcomers to games journalism, I'd recommend skimming the selected notes chapter in the back to determine which chapters are most likely to be of interest based on who is interviewed.

On the downside, the prose of the book was more likely to push me away than draw me in. It often has an overly-familiar style that can be tricky to pull off, particularly when the videogame invoked emotions and sentiments described in first persons passages didn't tend to match my experience with the games in question. Similarly, while I think Goldberg is probably dead on when he emphasizes the importance of salesmanship by indie game designers, I didn't come away from the book bustling with new ideas or with a notably different take on videogames. He also sometimes falls into the trap up game triumphalism, while he willing to critique the widely acknowledged failures of those he interviews, his description of the strong points of their successes tends to be unalloyed. Picking an example from near the end of the book, his write-up of Shadow Complex makes no mention of the controversy regarding Orson Scott Card. A long discussion was not necessary, but the subtitle of the book is "How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture," the boycott attempt driven by a reaction to Card's social conservative activism seems well within its purview.

So in short, I think this book is a best fit for those curious about the corporate and entrepreneurship side of things; that have a lot of interest but a little information about some of the games and companies profiled; or that enjoy Harold Goldberg's prose in his online game journalism. Those primarily interested in games criticism should probably look elsewhere, although I'm grateful to Goldberg for mentioning Ian Bogost's persuasive games which apparently argues that games have a procedural rhetoric that can be convincing in a different way than other forms oratory rhetoric. That's a concept I'm quite interested in and a book I'll have to add to my wish list.

Source: Borrowed from my mother-in-law. Thanks!

Data point of hope: rejecting the Norquist tax pledge

Rosalind Helderman of the Post reports the good news that some Republican candidates are rejecting signing Grover Norquist’s pledge to not raise tax.

Of the 25 candidates this year promoted by the National Republican Congressional Committee as “Young Guns” and“Contenders” — the top rungs of a program that highlights promising candidates who are challenging Democrats or running in open seats — at least a third have indicated they do not plan to sign the pledge authored by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist.

Two of the seven candidates promoted by the NRCC as the “Young Gun Vanguard” —candidates competing in open seats that are considered Republican-leaning — also have declined to sign.

The pledge pushed by Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, compels candidates to “resist any effort” to raise tax rates for individuals and businesses. Signers also pledge to oppose the elimination of tax credits and deductions unless they are matched dollar-for-dollar with tax cuts.

The pledge is incompatible with good governance. A similar pledge against spending cuts would also be ridiculous but no such pledge exists making Norquist’s work a notably successful and all encompassing blight on our system. However, that’s old news, the big question is why is it happening. The candidates cited desires to close specific loopholes or make big debt deals. Helderman also cites the looming sequestration crisis and Democrats holding firm on the need for some tax hikes or defense cuts.My analysis would be that by actually forcing the issue they’ve caused Republicans to face a classical governing dilemma and makes their trade-offs real ugly. Finally, a demonstration effect matters: some Republican primary candidate non-signers were also able to beat those that signed the pledge and Sen. Coburn of Oklahoma has been a prominent defector from the pledge which offers breathing room to candidates.

I don’t know to what extent the candidates or campaign managers have seen the research, but political science gives a powerful motivation for not signing the pledge. Michal Tomz and Robert Van Houweling conducted a study on the impact of Norquist’s pledges. Ezra Klein admirably summarized it, the key point is that even voters that are willing to support taxes are likely to punish pledge breakers. This shows the sheer effectiveness of the pledge, but also makes clear that the benefits received from signing it may be overwhelmed by the costs of breaking it in environment where avoiding tax hikes is becoming increasingly difficult.

Just had my first experience with Capital Bikeshare

Capital Bikeshare is a subscription system in D.C. which allows you to check out bikes at one location and return them to another. If you check the bike in again fast, in 30 minutes I think, there's no charge. I got a subscription when I saw a discount for them earlier, it took a few days to get my pass so you can't just grab and go when first you feel interested. Anyways, this is the first time I've used them in large part because during my earlier attempts I underestimated the force it took to remove a checked out bike.

There is an app called spotcycle that helps you find stations, although it doesn't seem to be integrated into Google Maps in such a way that helps you pull up directions. I ended up just running spotcycle while walking and then pulling it up again when pulled over at a corner near my destination. To the degree that your cycling between familiar locales this won't be a problem but it can be a bit trickier when first starting out.

On the whole I found biking in D.C. and easier prospect than I expected. There's a reasonable number of bikers about and a fair number of bike lanes if you're willing to adjust your route a bit. Tonight, I'd been making a trip to Adams Morgan, a neighborhood notably without a Metro stop, and bikeshare really does seem like a great way to do it.

I'll keep experimenting with the system. I'm curious whether I can use it to get to my occasional appointments at Georgetown University Hospital or as a means of reasonably reliable conveyance to Union Station when the hour is late and Metro trains are less frequent. Time will tell, but I had a good time riding so I'm happy to experiment. Now I just need to bring my helmet into work.

The destinations themselves, Bourbon and Bier Baron, were quite pleasant. I'm not a huge bar person but they both offered a pretty good experience on a Wednesday night.

Last Train Home 2012/05/15

I recently rediscovered where to go to get write ups for criticism of video games. the aptly named Critical Distance blog. Game articles are the theme of this round up and if you want a wider selection I certainly recommend checking out critical distance:

• I already mentioned this on my Google+ feed, but I thought Extra Credits did a constructive job of looking at the problem of harassment in online gaming communities and the question of what can be done about it.
• Soctt Juster at PopMatters put his finger on a game trait that I think older games often managed better than newer titles: "One of my favorite aspects of video games is their ability to simulate worlds that reconcile the conflict between huge spaces and quick trips.  Virtual spaces can be big enough to feel large and mysterious but small enough to mentally map as a contiguous whole, even after you get the ability to fast travel via the equivalent of a virtual jet. "
• Krystian Majewski at Game Design Scrapbook wrote a piece noting that the first Suikoden game pull off the team building premise of Mass Effect and in some ways manages it even better. Sadly, many of the later Suikoden games are fairly widely seen as disappointments, although I quite liked Suikoden 2 as well. I'm not sure where the series hit the wall.
• Wondering where the music games have gone and whether they'll return? Adil Sherwani at Medium Difficulty has an insightful discussion on what Guitar Hero and Rock Band did and did not achieve while citing Smule's Ocarina iPhone app as pointing to a possible way forward. I'll have to see if the app is available for Android as well.

Legend of Korra continues Avatar's tradition of excellent antagonists

Sympathetic antagonists are one of my favorite things in fiction, if for no other reasons then that they add variety to the stories. If the enemy is nihilist or totalitarian evil then their degree of success is just a matter of how dark the pieces is. However, if the threat actually has a sympathetic cause, in this case standing up for ordinary people in a city largely run by those with special bending abilities, then it is far from clear how things will shake out.

I don't want to get into too much speculation at this point. Let me just say instead that if you were a fan of the first series be sure to check out Legend of Korra. This is particularly easy because the episodes are available, with commercials, for free online. Coming in without having seen the first series won't tell you as much about the world and will indirectly spoil some things about the ending. However, if you don't have an easy means to get a hold of it then I'd say that the core plotline should be perfectly enjoyable and the 70 year time skip means that the world in question is a very different one.

This ones for Shar and other lovers of swimming predators

I'm a big Gaba Kulka fan and will have to  post some album reviews at some point. Short version: she's got an interesting vocal range and playfully incongruous lyrics.

Last Train Home

I've been stockpiling these for a while. Some probably merit their own blog posts, but my new years resolution for this year was 'no more backlogs.'

• Sara Robinson argues that we need to return to the 40 hour-week. Yes, techies too. She cites research that notes that we first adopted the forty hour limits for a mix of worker rights and productivity reasons. As a side note, I think it might make sense to extend the school day. However, teacher workloads and student homework assignments should be adjusted accordingly.
• Mike Mitchell cites great artistic advice from Ira Glass. The short version is that when you start on any artistic project your ambitions won't match your taste. However, by completing many projects you can start to close the gap.
• Fredrik DeBoer clips a bloggingheads.tv between Aaron Brady and Mike Konzcal arguing for keeping public universities public. This was in the context of the police crackdown against the occupy movement at UC Davis. This applied to a question at a Purple Line event this past year at the University of Maryland Campus. One of the student reporters had asked whether having the light rail on campus would allow non-students to access the campus at night (there's restrictions on those driving, but not walking, in). Fears about campus crime are not illegitimate, although there are real differences between having a car and coming in via transit such that at very least there's a transit driver that would likely see the riders. With that caveat out of the way, the question failed to recognize that public university campuses aren't a gated community, they are to serve the public.

Event: SIPRI military expenditure data 1988-2011

The briefing: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is well known for their military expenditure data which emphasizes consistent global coverage. Sam Perlo-Freeman went over the data. World spending is $1.7 trillion and for the first time since 1998 did not increase in real terms. That comes to $249 per person or 2.5% of world GDP. This leveling off was driven by the United States, although otherwise patterns from 2010 to 2011 I hard to discern. Russia and some developing world countries have been moving up on rankings and European countries have been down, although the U.S. is still dominant at 41% of global military spending. One regional point: Asia and Oceania has overtaken western and central Europe in the past few years.

SIPRUI puts the U.S. at $711 billion in outlays, which includes State department military age. That puts it at 4.7% of U.S. GDP, one of the higher rates in the world. They anticipate overall spending to fall given the end of the wars, assuming no new ones start, and if sequestration starts in January 2013 it will mean much steeper declines. By comparison, the total for Europe was fairly constant, but only thanks to increases from Russia and Azerbaijan (89%!). In central Europe the cuts started in 2009, spending in western Europe  ha been declining more recently although France, Germany, and the U.K. have been making smaller cuts so far. As you might expect, Greece, Spain, and Italy have all had fairly dramatic cuts.

Review: The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss

Post-Revolutionary War America isn't a setting I've read much about before, let alone as the basis for a novel that is in part a financial thriller. The Whiskey Rebels trades off between a disgraced Revolutionary War spy and an upcoming would-be novelist.  The former primarily stays in the great-ish east coast cities of the day while the latter travels with her husband into the wilds past Pittsburgh. The actual Whiskey Rebellion itself doesn't play that big a role, as the period is wrong, but that's no demerit to the story.

Both the leads are good characters, with a plausible mix of flaws that I felt the novel sometimes forgave but rarely whitewashed. The prominent supporting characters include a slave whose promised freedom was wrongly delayed, a lady whose high stature provides her little protection against her husband, and a vicious Jewish special agent working for Alexander Hamilton. As that list should show, the characters come from a variety of backgrounds which enriches the historical setting of the novel.

The story is a mix of conspiracy thriller and frontier adventure with the rise of the Bank of the United States, hated by the eventual Whiskey Rebels, being a core plot element. I rather liked this as it was a part of history I knew a bit about but was on the balance more ignorant than informed. At the same time, it was quite relevant to our modern era.

Almost to my surprise, the ending was particularly solid. I don't want to give anything away, but I'd say it managed to stay true to the values and cleverness common to the rest of the book. That can be particularly hard to pull when the main characters can be tricksters in their own right, which makes the successful implementation all the more satisfying.

Source: Moti, thanks Moti!

Review: Paolo's in Georgetown, D.C.

My mother and I got lunch at Paolo's on my birthday before heading over to Georgetown Hospital. It was a good choice for a nice day as there were a fair number of patio seats available. We shared one higher-end entrée, seared scallops, and one $13 grilled chicken pizza. Both were quite good as were the warm breadsticks and dipping sauce served at the outset.

I don't hit Georgetown often, but I'll definitely keep this place in mind for the future. It was a short hop from the closest Circulator stop and the range of menu items means it could esaily fit different occasions. As is, we took a fair amount of pizza with us as leftovers; we could probably have split just that and a salad and been satisfied.

Source: Mom's treat, thanks Mom! Priscilla's recommendation, thanks for that from both of us; well done!

Things other games should steal from 4th edition DnD

I've actually been playing some version or other of the venerable system since college. However, I'm not really the target demographic of the next edition as I'm not that into fantasy and quite like non-combat mechanics, and D&D Next aims to be the arch-typical version of the system rather than moving in a new direction. There will doubtless be modules of interest to me, but this seems like a good time to say my goodbyes. The points below are meant to be my favorite parts of the edition, not the best in any objective sense. 

Special powers that can be used freely (encounter powers and at-wills): 4th edition made fairly heavy use of powers that could be used at will or once per scene. If I'm playing in an environment where supernatural abilities are in play, I like to be able to use them freely. The once per scene (or encounter to use the technical term) powers did this particularly well, because they could be substantial without being game breaking. This combined well with 4th edition's encouragement to freely reflavor things: the mechanical effect may be defined but it is easy enough to ascribe the source to anything you desire.

Mechanically meaningful non-attack powers (utility powers and themes): As I mentioned above, I'm not quite a stereotypical story gamer. While I enjoy challenge and conflict, I'm just more interested in confrontations that aren't violent, let alone lethal. 4th edition D&D offered two notable new sources for such abilities: utility powers, which came along every few levels, and themes, which help define how a character starts out. Good flavor and mechanical matches particularly matter here and D&D delivers with powers like allowing rangers to keep someone from falling over a ledge by catching them with an arrow or allowing those skilled in the ways of magic to use technobabble to help get them out of a social problem once a scene. This is a mechanical space that could in theory be filled by feats, a game element that sometimes involves prerequisite but is typically chosen from a vast list. The selection of utility powers is more limited; you have to qualify for them via class, theme, or skill. This encourages them to be more defined, easier to balance, and makes their numbers less overwhelming. Also critically, neither utility powers nor themes are charged with doing the heavy lifting of making a character effective, which gives more room for flavorful selections.

Digital tools: I think the character builder and online rules compendium has been rather game changing. I've paid the subscription fee happily and haven't even minded that much when the character builder went from desktop client to web tool.

Design that draws from a wide range of games: This is sometime mentioned as a knock against 4th edition, particularly in reference to video games. However, I'd say that video games and board games have both advanced greatly over the past decades. Not all changes have been for the best, but I think we have a much better idea of what it means to get the underlying math right. This matters to me as a player, because knowing that I've checked the box when it comes to effectiveness gives me freedom to be playful. This matters far more as a GM, as getting a solid balanced system should be one of the big perks of going to larger companies for games. Playtesting, R&D shops, and system updates all take hard work and are well worth paying for.

Things other games should steal from Mass Effect 2

I just finished the game with my femShep paragon sentinel. I enjoyed it, although I think its best thought of as a series of episodes rather the stronger mini-arcs and main arc of the first game. In keeping with my recent post on pop culture dominance, I'm not going to go with a full review or even a critique. Instead, I'll just emphasize those elements I'd like to see used in other games.

But first, here's my favorite character doing Gilbert and Sullivan:

1. Having a small number of well defined powers with clearly labeled interactions. Some people have complained that Mass Effect 2 was dumbed down; that may be true.  However, having a smaller number of powers and clearly labeling when they would be effective allowed for a wider range of mechanically distinct characters. In addition, I think I actually used all of the powers available in the game fairly often. Similarly, the original game was vastly improved upon by dramatically reducing the number of guns while making them actually feel different.
2. Evocative hacking mini-games: There were two hacking games: one involved selecting matching source code, the other involved linking circuits on a board. They were both quite simple and actually could have used a steeper difficulty curve. However, they were enough to make the hacking feel genuinely technical in no small part thanks to good visual design. The probe mini-game does fairly well too in that regard, but I disapprove of that form of resource gathering because it's ultimately a mechanic that lets you trade your time for more in-game resources.
3. The conversation interrupt mechanic: The alignment system is nothing spectacular: you get paragon or renegade points based on your choices, although nicely enough you often can get some of each from the same conversation. That said, I was pleased by the way the plot mandated that being a paragon required some standing up to your patron. In any event, those points are spent by allowing you to interrupt a conversation; for example, a paragon might convince someone not to do something stupid while a renegade might shoot them before they had a chance to draw. In Star Wars terms, Han Solo was able to shoot Greedo first thanks to all of the mouthing off he does elsewhere in the series.
4. Reasonable chance of a few support characters dying: I hope I'm not being too bloody-minded here, but people die in war and its important to remember that. One of the real strengths of the first two games of the series is that your choices directly impact who dies. I particularly regret the character who died in my playthrough; he might have had an important future, but I think some regret is appropriate for this sort of tale.

(Mild outcome spoilers on my playthrough: lost Grunt, dating Garrus)

Origin: Gift from Ryan, thanks Ryan!

Update: Noted origin and moved spoilers to the end to get them out of the google plus preview.

The overwhelming victory of popular culture

I read with interest a recent cultural piece by Fredrik deBoer in no small part because I was curious to see whether he'd cite Leigh Alexander (spoiler: he does.) His opening sentence does its job well, so while I 'd encourage reading the whole piece, I'll start by quoting it: "Pop culture has become inescapable."

Criticism as a form of writing and entertainment appears to have spread dramatically as a result of lowered barriers to entry. At the same time, traditional print bastions have been savaged by the rise of online alternatives. This reduces the positions and platforms available for high culture gatekeepers, particularly as they compete with mass-market friendly pop culture critics. Thus, as often as Roger Ebert might say that games aren't art or the like, pop-culture criticism has experienced a victorious rise. Thus, I agree with deBoer that the burden of magnanimity should be born by victors and obviously they should avoid self-pity.

At the same, I think his middle-brow vs. high-brow lens misses one important explanation behind pop culture critics' defensiveness. Many of these critics are engaged in the hard work of standard-raising: attempting to weed out misogyny,  homophobia, racism, and other more traditional forms of bad writing. Tough criticism, constructive and not, is common even towards series that a critic may love (i.e. the epilogue of Harry Potter book 7). One of the most common defenses against this criticism is to defame pop culture as mere entertainment and that to analyze it is to miss the point or maliciously ruin it.

Quoting deBoer's post:

I know that people really want it to mean something that they love Community rather than Two and a Half Men. But I’m afraid such a distinction cannot say anything meaningful about you. People cling to that idea because they feel divorced from traditional means of creating personal meaning and identity; naturally, people so committed lash out, unfairly, at those who make different choices in the consumption of art and media.

I am a Community fan, but if I am being fair, I must certainly accept that it is no vice not to like the show and that there are many valid ways to criticize it. Even more so, I think it is safe to say that any discussion of good pop culture art easily drowns out discussion of difficult or high culture art. Part of the definition of a good critic is finding and popularizing lesser-known high quality material and there is a real risk for pop culture critics that they will ignore that part of culture that has not yet hit some threshold of popularity. However, I think this description doesn't leave room for the critic as standard-raiser (see, for example, Alyssa Rosenberg championing diversity in response to comments the creator of Two and Half Men). To be clear, deBoer may not put much weight on this standard-raising function or may understand it differently. This would not be hypocritical on his part; he was not trashing pop culture but instead was saying that the high/difficult art that he loves was underserved.

Finally, I think deBoer may be overlooking the participatory aspect of popular culture consumption. From fanfiction.net, to fan art, to cosplay, to merely discussing one's thoughts on a piece with friends. Having a common frame of reference lowers the barriers to artistic participation. Such work is, by definition, somewhat derivative but I would argue that it still allows some to create who otherwise would not and for others acts as gateway drug into original works. This sort of participation is partially explains why fans may feel so committed to a particularly series: because they have invested some of their own creative output into the product. I think deBoer would argue that it is a mistake to do so, but I would also say that participatory derivative art is as old as sing-a-longs and may have some of the same benefits.

To close, I reserve the right to do political analysis blogging of Legend of Korra, but I think I'll try harder to make sure I write up my experiences with the obscure. I would also glad subscribe to a feed of a blog that recommends difficult or high culture works based on tastes in popular culture. Going from say, Rowling's Harry Potter to Grossman's The Magicians is a fairly well known way to experiment with working one's way up the cultural food chain. However, I'm not aware of many other such connections. Right now, the closest thing I have are the more widely-ranging Washington Post book reviews and my friend Moti's Platform #5 livejournal reviews.

Reminder: Maryland primary elections are today

If you would like to see candidates responses to questionnaires about key issues in the race check out Vote411.org. There's no endorsement and no fact checking or the like, but for many of the minor races this is one of the easiest ways to see all the candidates on one page.

As a reminder, Maryland runs closed primary elections, so you will only have a chance to select candidates for whatever party you are registered with. However, independents and third party members can still vote for nonpartisan elections, like school board.

Unlike the League of Women Voters, I do endorsements. However, a lot of local races relevant to transportation aren't in play this year, so I'll just endorse Sen. Cardin. He's done a fairly good job and his main challenger isn't especially liberal, at least on social issues.

Review: Ticket to Ride

If you are a regular reader, it should come as no surprise that my family enjoys train-themed games. Ticket to Ride's premise is a trifle silly: it involves a competition to travel across America (or presumably whatever alternate continental version you're playing with) to win a bet. The method is gathering matching cards representing freight cars, passenger cars, coal cars, and the like, to lay down connections between various cities. I'm not sure how the non-passenger cars fit with the premise, but that's nothing that couldn't be fixed by adding hobos to the setup.

The gameplay is pretty fun for a few reasons. First, turns are quick; you have three actions among which to choose and none of them take long. Second, I like the card draw mechanic: you draw twice and can choose from five face up cars or take a random draw. This reduces the luck element, although if you draw a face-up wild card (the engine) you only get to draw once; however every time you draw from the random deck there's a chance of a wild card. Finally, while routes are worth points based on their length, there's bonus points available based on multi-route cards that mandate connecting two cities. These routes are randomly drawn, with some opportunity to discard, which does add variety from game to game and incentives vast interconnected rail networks.

All and all, a solid simple game that I'm glad I got for my parents a few years back, although sadly I just got one game in with my father. I think the thematic element could use some work (and is amusingly mocked by Dork Tower), but I'm a sucker for trains and placing little plastic cars on a map is a lot of fun. That said, as a Marylander, I feel somewhat offended that Baltimore, origin point of the B&O, didn't make the map.

Players for review: First game, Mom and Dad, second game, Mom and Kate.

Review: Carcassonne add-on Traders and Builders

Carcassonne is a fairly well-known European-style-tile laying game. The players take turns placing squares to expand a map of fields, roads, monasteries, and walled cities meant to evoke a region in France. As they do so, they place their little wooden pieces, called meeples, to score points based on a variety of terrain features. This review will be most interesting to those that have played the original game, but I'll discuss a few general design features at the end.

This add-on struck our fancy because it fits well with my wife's preferred play style: filling in gaps in the map rather than sprawling off to the sides. This is an aesthetically pleasing play style and one that fits the theme of the game as to my knowledge there are no gaping holes in reality in the French countryside.

Traders and Builders uses multiple methods to achieve this goal. First, it reduces the incentive to block other player's cities by providing a reward in the form of trade goods to any player that finishes a city. Second, it adds a "builder" piece that allows a second turn each round if you lay your tile in a way that connects to an existing city or road. This has the virtue of focusing one player's attention and keeping the game from slowing down despite the addition of new pieces. Third, a new "pig" piece increases the bonuses received from a single field. Fields are one of the mechanisms from the original game that encourage players to play in a concentrated area, either to reap points from ever-expanding pastures or to firmly enclose the grasslands of another player. Finally, the new tiles, in addition to introducing trade goods, seem well-chosen to match up with difficult-to-fill spots from the base game.

Traders and Builders could be fairly critiqued for adding three new elements, and thus sacrificing some of the original game's simplicity. However, I think all the pieces interlock well and show signs of carefully considered balance and play-testing.

I might not have noticed Traders and Builders if not for the advice of a clerk at the Family Game Store at Savage Mills, who broke out the virtues in a way that made the choice over "Inns and Cathedrals," another add-on, an easy one. Typically, I think of game add-ons as introducing a new element to an existing game.  I think it's a far rarer breed that also reinforces the core game while adding a fun new aspect.

Fellow players for the review: Kate, Andrew, and Monica. Thanks all.

Image from BoardGameGeek.com

Source: My mother given to Kate. Thanks Mom for the gift and Kate for letting me play!

Review: Azul 17

Last night, Kate treated me to Azul 17, a higher-end Mexican restaurant in Howard County. We had a good time and were particularly impressed by our helpful waiter, who when asked gave advice on a variety of matters and made up the guacamole we ordered as an appetizer. That is actually one of the gimmicks the restaurant is known for; it was indeed fresh and tasty although I think the price is primarily justified by the chance to see it made up. The process didn't seem that hard if you have the right ingredients, so perhaps I'll give it a try someday.

The menu we ordered off is more extensive than the one online, but roughly Kate had a seafood casserole with shrimp, clams, snapper, and scallops in a tomato broth. We both found the red snapper to be particularly exceptional and I loved the rice. I'd ordered an enchilada with mushrooms and huitlacoche. The latter is also known as corn smut, but tastes far better than it sounds. Kate says if you are already eating mushrooms, what's one more fungus? She's right, the disparate elements of the enchilada made a great light vegetarian dish and the leftovers were terrific today.

Finally we had a flight of tequila. That was reasonably fun; the more whiskey-esque variants seem to be our speed. That said, I don't think either of us feel the need to make a habit of it. As Azul 17's tequila specialization suggests, many of the dishes and sauces were quite spicy, including the palette cleanser drink.  We got by all right, so if you're a spice fiend you may wish to check it out and if you are not be sure that you've got some tamer dishes in the mix.

Source: Picked by Kate when she saw a LivingSocial deal.  Thanks, Kate!

Is class segregation driving American inequality?

In his defense of the newest Charles Murray book, Ross Douthat raised what may be the heart of the issue [emphasis mine]:

Second, “Coming Apart” offers a convincing account of how meritocracy has exacerbated the problems that Murray describes — encouraging the best and brightest to work and live and (especially) mate within the cocoons of what he calls the SuperZIPS, segregating Americans by intelligence to an unprecedented degree, and creating a self-reinforcing pattern in to those with much social capital, much more is given, while to those without, even what they have is taken away. Again, he’s drawing on other authors and other works — Bill Bishop in “The Big Sort,” Richard Florida (by implication) in his various paeans to the so-called “creative class” and the “creative cities” they call home. But Murray has been thinking and writing about these issues for a long time, and it shows. I’ve rarely read a better distillation of the case for meritocracy’s in-egalitarian, anti-communitarian, and even anti-democratic tendencies, and what the cultivation of a meritocratic elite can mean for the people left behind.

I would argue that the mechanism for this segregation is the unaffordability of property values in these SuperZIPs. Many of America’s great liberal cities and enclaves are unaffordable as Dan Reed recently documented in detail for the DC area. Given that most American schools are funded by property taxes, those areas that are affordable are often unattractive for those with children. I think this could also partially explain why so many young people have responded to the bad economy by moving back in with their parents. Saving money on rent is nice, but moving in with your parents might be the only way may young people can get into a neighborhood with good opportunities.

In the larger sense, this gets to the issue of why Blue States subsidize Red States. Many poor people live in Red States (although the poor people there are still fairly economically liberal). So why don’t these people just move to Blue States which have more jobs and often a better social safety net ? Why be in the lower class in Alabama when you could be poor in Massachusetts? Cultural issues and proximity to family shouldn’t be discounted, but I think the answer is property values again. If you want a nice house or even a crummy house and a rental but in a nice school district, I suspect it’s easier to find it in a Red State.  Yglesias specifically argues that this is a big driver of population growth in Texas.

I think the affordable housing movement will help at the margins, but I don’t think set asides and subsidies and the like have managed to scale. Charles Murray argues that the solution to the top 5% bubble is to preach what your practice, Andrew Gelman does a good job of examining this argument and showing its flaws. I think the solution is different, we need to break down the barriers to increasing the supply of housing for rent or purchase in blue state cities and inner suburbs. Segregation by class is a fundamental in justice and we can do things about it. Local politics can be one of the easiest places to influence, albeit also the place of the most vicious fights. The battleground against inequality may well be homeowners meetings, zoning hearings, battles over accessory apartments, attempts to block new townhouses and multistory buildings. My favorite related issue is mass transit, which can expand the reach of cities and inner suburbs and enables density as roads are inevitably overwhelmed with congestion. I should also add, I don’t think I’m doing full justice to Sheryll Chasin’s argument, but many of these ideas I developed after reading her book “The Failures of Integration.”

Review: Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse

This was my first Wodehouse book and it was a reasonable starting point to the Jeeves and Wooster stories. It was a fairly quick read and in my view really got going around page 100 as the action came to a head, specifically as a painting was used for some fairly ineffective head-cracking. The zaniness continued largely unabated from that point onward, which did heighten my enjoyment as the relentlessness of the plotting meant that the underlying absurdity of the problems was overwhelmed by the urgency of dealing with them.  I enjoyed the whole thing, although I fear my comparatively weak background in the western canon meant that I was missing how some of the classical quotes were being tweaked. My only real takeaway about the culture being described was a curiosity about whether the characters' willingness to prank the police was primarily an upper-class thing or whether it reflects differences between British and American culture. Cops are often buffoons in American comedies, but characters don't go around stealing their hats or the like unless avenging a particular slight. Come to think of it, more than anything else the attitude reminds me of that of the Phoenix Wright games.

I'll run down the rest of my book backlog  before returning to the series, but I do have definite hopes that the humor of the series will be cumulative as I get to know the characters better. I often end up turned off by series that revolve around the suffering of a foolish main character, but Wooster is shown to have a healthy dose of humanity and wit if not wisdom.

Source: Recommended by Andrew and Monica, loaned to me by my father-in-law; thanks all.

This blog opposes the Stop Online Piracy Act

 

For reasons why, look to Ezra Klein's interview with Sen. Ron Wyden. The whole interview is worth reading, but here are key excerpts:

EK: What makes PIPA and SOPA cluster bombs? If you agree there is a problem, why aren’t these acceptable solutions?

RW: PIPA and SOPA, at their heart, are censorship bills and blacklisting bills, and they undermine much of the architecture of the internet…  What the bills do is say, when you get a court order, you can’t use the domain-name system to resolve to the IP address.

EK; When you say “resolve to the IP address,” exactly what that means. Let’s say I run EzraTube.com. And someone has uploaded copyrighted content to my site. What happens next?

RW: When you type EzraTube.com into your browser, your browser is asking Comcast to ask other servers where that goes. These servers basically act as phonebooks. What the so-called “DNS remedy” in the bill does is enable the attorney general to get a court order that tells Comcast, ‘when people want to find EzraTube.com, don’t send them there. Send them to a Department of Justice site instead.’ People who want to work around this would be able to. There are already third-party tools that use foreign servers or other domain-name servers outside of Comcast’s network. But that’s a problem because, for the last 15 years, we’ve spent all this time building the DNS system into a secure standard…

EK: As I understand it, another element of these bills is that they would move the burden of policing content to the Web sites themselves. Right now, YouTube, if alerted to pirated content, needs to get it down. Under SOPA and PIPA, YouTube would be responsible for making sure it never goes up in the first place, and liable if they missed a video.

RW: You are describing what I call the “turn Web sites into Web cops” provision. This is a provision that has raised concern about what this is going to mean for innovation. If you’re a small Web site trying to get off the ground and you look at that provision, you put people through this kind of legal burden, which will mean a significant amount of money for anyone trying something new, it will do a lot of damage to innovation. That’s one reason the venture capital folks are speaking out.

[Update: Now's a good day to contact your member of Congress. Probably no need to send more than a polite sentence or two or use a form letter, I'm guessing numbers matter more than the specific message at this point. In Maryland, Sen. Cardin at least seems to be responding to SOPA/PIPA concerns.]

Programming note: Since this is a typepad blog and not a wordpress one, I don't see a quick and easy way to down it entirely [and frankly my readership is relatively small so I'm focusing on a call to action rather than get the tech right.]. So this post is my means of solidarity.

What’s an anti-interventionist liberal’s alternative to Paul?

Over at L'Hôte, Freddie argues that the argument over Rep. Ron Paul’s weaknesses has been used as a distraction from the larger critique of American interventions. Robert Farley pushes back some on the specific Indonesian example Freddie raises. While I’m generally anti-occupation I’m not an anti-interventionist, but I think it’s important to keep them part of the discussion.

I’d first like to note a point of disagreement with the post.

Left wing politicians like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich have embraced discussion of foreign policy and civil liberties, and for their trouble they have been dismissed as unserious by the self-same progressives who now dismiss Ron Paul's ideas…

I do think Rep. Kucinich does tend to be dismissed, but I don't think discussing Sen. Sanders (no relation) is taboo. Ezra Klein interviewed him in August of 2011. Admittedly Klein interviews many politicians, but in May of 2011 he posted video of Sen. Sanders smacking down Sen. Rand Paul. In June of 2011 Klein argued that the moderation of Sen. Sanders proposals, compared to Republican extremism, shows that the national debate is imbalanced. The Senator from Vermont appears to appreciate Klein's work and cited him from the floor of the Senate in June(Source: Fishbowl D.C.). Now that’s just Ezra Klein and is in a domestic context, so perhaps the specific objection is that Sen. Sanders foreign policy views aren’t really discussed.

That objection aside, the question Freddie raises at the end is well worth addressing:

I want those who profess belief in liberalism and egalitarianism to recognize that they are failing those principles every time they ignore our conduct overseas, or ridicule those who criticize it. What I will settle for is an answer to the question: what would they have us do? If you can't find it in you to accept our premises, at least consider what you would do if you did. For those of us who oppose our country's destructive behavior, there is no place to turn that does not result in ridicule…

I think the solution is primary challenges for members of Congress. Matt Yglesias and Freddie have disagreed about this point before but I think the key argument for congressional challenges is that they have a proven track record. The various conservative groups that now make up the Tea Party make regular use of primary challenges and have been rewarded with increasing ideological consistency in Republican Party.

This isn’t to say they haven’t overreached and cost the Republican party seats, it’s a tactic with clear limits. However, I think the experience on the Republican side, see the 1992 election, also indicates that Congressional challenges are far less likely to backfire than Presidential ones. Working on getting state government elected officials is generally a good idea but obviously isn’t that helpful for shifting foreign policy.

I think clear and enforceable red lines are another fairly effective technique. This means picking certain issues where disagreeing with your group means denial of funding or even actively supporting a replacement candidate. Part of the reason there’s such strong pushback against Rep. Paul is that he impressively manages to violate the redlines of almost every member of the liberal coalition. In the 2008 election, I’d say the anti-interventionist made fairly effective use of support for the Iraq war as a redline issue which is part of what got President Obama the nomination. I think that electoral effort deserves part of the credit for the fact that we’re did comply with our treaties and withdrawal the U.S. military (if not contractors) from Iraq.

This is actually an area where a fair amount of popular support is potentially available as both the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan lost popular support well before they lost elite support. Dan Drezner has argued that realism rather than liberal internationalism has more support among the American populace. To be sure, realism is not primarily concerned with preventing U.S. complicity in overseas violence but it is fairly consistently anti-interventionist in a way that does check liberal and neocon hawkery. I’d advise finding one or two policy statements that have support from a strong majority or vehement plurality in a fair number of states or Congressional districts. The anti-war movement probably doesn’t have the clout to raise their own challengers, but such criteria, if publicly applied, could help leverage existing resources by targeting them all at one race.

I think it would also be fair to withhold funding from any candidates, including President Obama, that violate your redlines. While I do have some strong objections to some of President Obama’s actions on civil liberties and foreign policy, I’m still willing to donate to him. However, I think redirecting donations of time or money away from a sitting Presidential candidate, even in a tough race, is a perfectly valid tactic for anti-interventionists. We all have to pick priorities.