Buchstauben

Microserfs

2011-09-21T08:50:00.000-07:00

He often uses low-tech solutions to high-tech problems: Popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and little strips of paper that turn on a bent coat hanger frame help him solve complex matrix problems. When he moved offices into his new window office (good coder, good office), he had to put Post-it notes reading "Not Art" on his devices so that the movers didn't stick them under the glass display cases out in the central atrium area.

–Microserfs, Douglas Coupland

How I caught simulation fever at summer camp when Glenn Beck sneezed

2011-07-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

It should come as no surprise that Glenn Beck recently made an inflammatory statement that reveals once more that there is no low to which he is unwilling to stoop. Normally I would read a headline like "Glenn Beck hits 'new low'; compares Norway victims to Hitler Youth" and move on with minimal hesitation, perhaps reading at most the first few paragraphs in order to learn what little context there may be that explains Beck's tasteless rants. This time, however, I actually finished the article, and am truly glad that I did.

In his infinite wisdom, Beck declared that a bunch of students gathering at a summer camp to learn more about national politics sounds like the Hitler youth. "Who," Beck asked, proving that he'd never attended a model UN, "does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing." It should come as no surprise that there are indeed a number of groups that offer politically oriented summer camps, ranging from non-partisan camps like Camp USA to a Tea Party-inspired camp. It is this latter camp that caught my attention.

At the Tea Party camp, children learn games that reinforce values held by the conservative group. One of the most compelling games is one in which children receive candies that they can use as a currency, which are meant to mimic gold. "On the second day," we are told, "the 'banker' will issue paper money instead. Over time, students will realise their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value." This game is meant to teach children the value of the gold standard, which, according to these rules, counteracts the inflation which paper money is subject to.

In Unit Operations: an Approach to Videogame Criticism, Ian Bogost articulates a condition that he dubs "simulation fever." Taking after Derrida's "archive fever," simulation fever is the "simultaneous drive towards and fear of" simulation. Bogost proposes that one way to deal with simulation fever would be to "encourage player critics to work through the simulation anxiety a simulation generates." Doing so, we can better understand the elements of the simulation that both attract and repulse us. "Working through simulation fever," Bogost writes, "means learning how to express what simulations choose to embed and to exclude." Bogost's approach is a helpful one, as it allows us to articulate our precise concerns with a particular simulation, an act that leaves us enriched far more than we would be if we were simply to reject the simulation outright, as one might be with this gold standard game. So let us, then, work through the simulation fever this game so readily inspires.

It is clear from the outset that this game is fixed. So long as a fixed number of candies remain in the game, there is no danger of their value ever increasing or decreasing. It is only the paper money that is subject to change, as, one can well imagine, the banker will be bringing more and more into circulation throughout the game. This, then, is where simulation fever sets in: the simulation is attractive, as it does indeed pit two types of currency against one another in a ways that seems, at first blush, to parallel the role of gold and cash in our society; yet at the same time it is also clear that there is something amiss here, that gold remains too stable. The game, we quickly realise, is designed so that gold will never change in value, and as such will seem the safe choice no matter the way it might work in the real world.

The game, however, is somewhat more complex than that. It seems hard to believe that children, when given a large amount of candy and minimal adult supervision, will manage to avoid eating any of the candy. As the supply of candy diminishes, the value of each remaining piece will increase accordingly. By the end of the weekend, the carefully constructed illusion will have shattered: children will be able to see quite plainly that gold is no more stable a currency than money. It is possible, too, that a child will uncover the camp supervisor's stash of candy, and that he or she will "liberate" a healthy amount to share with friends, thus causing the value of "gold" to plummet. While these behaviours may seem at first to be extra-diegetic, they are, in fact, perfectly in keeping both with the nature of the game and of real life.

In the face of such anarchy (some might choose to call it the market), it seems likely that the camp supervisor (or supervisors) may decide to clamp down, regulating strictly the amount of "gold" in circulation at any given moment. While this will correct the "errors" introduced into the game by the children, it will also change the nature of the game: children are no longer learning that the gold standard is a stable and desirable thing that can weather even the stormiest economy; instead, children are learning that a stable economy requires constant monitoring, regulation, and frequent interventions by a governing body, lest it spin out of control based on the greed and poor planning of the various stakeholders. Ultimately, the gold standard game teaches children that several of the core values of the tea party are in fact flimsy fictions, and that they will inevitably implode.

Working through our simulation fever, then, reveals the gold standard game to be much richer than we, and indeed its creators, could have imagined it to be. What at first appear to be simple rules reveal themselves to hold hidden nuances that can have drastic effects when players probe them. It is clear that merely rejecting the simulation without examining it in this way leaves us impoverished, and with a poor understanding of how a system can transform suddenly and in unexpected ways.

RIP Robert Kroetsch

2011-06-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

"Isador Heck proposed to include himself into heaven. To that end he'd built a Cannon of the sort he'd been shot from while travelling with the circus. He'd had a terrible argument with Father Basil who believed there is an afterlife but who refused to acknowledge there is a place where it might be lived. Heck countered with his conviction that anything that can be imagined exists."

--Robert Kroetsch, What the Crow Said

Nineteen Eighty-Four

2011-06-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

When I saw the now-iconic photo of the couple kissing in yesterday's Vancouver riot, I just knew it'd be perfect as the cover photo for one of the new Penguin Modern Classics editions. Here's my quick Photoshop mock-up.

Tpyo

2011-06-09T15:23:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about typos lately, and the way in which they reveal the conditions that lead to their birth. We would never expect someone typing on a Dvorak keyboard to accidentally type "pwn" where they meant to type the word "own," but typos like "teh" are, presumably, just as easy to make.

Typos are by no means a new phenomenon. As Randall McLeod points out in "Unemending Shakespeare's Sonnet 111," there is one in the 1703 quarto of Hamlet, where "the hero enjoins Ophelia to be 'as Chaste as Ice, as puer as Snosh.'" The sh in Snosh, McLeod explains, is actually an sh-ligature, which in the typecases of the era was adjacent to the w. Just one quick slip of the fingers and the compositor joined the ranks of all of us who've sent a piece of writing off to press without noticing the glaring error we'd so come to regret.

Snosh, as amusing as it is, never seems to have entered the popular imagination. Other typos, like the aforementioned "teh" and "pwn," have become words in their own right, having flourished in internet and gaming communities. I've been wondering what other typos might have led rich, full lives in the past, especially typos tied to outmoded and obsolete technology. Were there iconic typos made on Fortran punch cards? Did a typo in loom pattern cards ever become the latest fashion craze? Was there an early modern equivalent to Damn You, Autocorrect!?

Sworcery

2011-04-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

End of term is keeping me busy, but what with the recent release of Portal 2 and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, I assure you that I'll have plenty to talk about come the end of April. In the meantime, enjoy this beautiful screenshot of S:S&S EP.

The environmental impact of ebooks

2011-04-07T07:33:00.000-07:00

The Green Press Initiative did an interesting breakdown of the environmental impact of ebooks. I think most of us have suspected that ebooks would ultimately prove better for the environment than print books, but because ebooks and print books generate waste in such different ways it is difficult to measure them neatly against one another. This report does a good job by focusing on consumer behaviour and establishing how many books one would have to read to generate less waste than the same number of print books.

The numbers are roughly what I had imagined: depending on which ereader you use, you'll have to read between 30 and 70 books over the course of the reader's lifetime to see any environmental gains. This means that for early adopters who frequently replace their ereading devices, it will be difficult to break even, whereas heavy readers who are willing to stick with a single device for a number of years can make a significant impact. Given that the national average for books read per year is around 20 (in 2007), many readers will probably be just ahead of the environmental impact they were making with their print reading habits. Not too bad, all in all. With luck, this will improve as ereaders become more efficient over time.

But what will make the biggest difference at the end of the day is how many books are printed. While it's helpful to see the potential impact ebook offset can make, that impact will only be realised if the proportionate number of books ceased to be printed. The book industry is prone to such waste: when I was working at a national bookstore, we would regularly have to strip the covers off mass market paperbacks and mail back those covers as proof that the books did not sell, before throwing the stripped books into the garbage. Regularly we would get another shipment of those exact same books later in the week, which would be placed on the just-vacated shelves where the now-stripped copies sat. So who's to say, then, that increased ereading numbers will lead to a decrease in the number of books printed? We can hope that publishers will be influenced by the potential economic savings to be had by not printing those books, but the history of the industry does not necessarily suggest that such changes will occur.

Ultimately, I would very much like to see the ebook replace the mass market paperback. As it stands now, the mass market is best suited for airports and drug stores, where readers can pick up something to read on that five-hour flight across the Atlantic. Given the number of ereading devices that allow that same reader to quickly download a couple of novels in the departure lounge, it seems to me that mass markets no longer have quite the same sense of purpose they once did. Once we see the decline of the mass market, I think we'll really see the environmental impact of ereading.

Ulysses: the Videogame

2011-03-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

While joking about the litigious nature of the Joyce estate, Mark Sample quipped "Just wait to see what Stephen does when I make a James Joyce videogame. FPS or IF, which should it be?" This got me thinking of what an actual Ulysses videogame would look like. Off the top of my head, the most important structural feature I can think of is that each chapter would incorporate a different technic. The game would be, I imagine, both FPS and IF, as well as a number of other options.

Please leave ideas for each chapter in the comments, and I'll pull together an outline of what the game chapters would look like. Feel free to give either general examples, or point to existing games for guidance. Who knows, maybe we'll get a grumpy letter from Mr Stephen Joyce himself?

Chapter : Technic

Telemachus

Nestor

Proteus: First Person Stream-of-consciousness, akin to that seen in Stout Games' IGF nominated Dinner Date

Calypso

Lotus Eaters

Hades

Aeolus

Lestrygonians

Scylla and Charybdis

Wandering Rocks

Sirens

Cyclops

Nausicaa

Oxen of the Sun

Circe

Eumaeus

Ithaca: Catechism based on Joseph Weizenbaum's classic ELIZA.

Penelope

Stand back--I'm going to try bibliography!

2011-03-22T05:36:00.000-07:00

Who says textual scholarship isn't exciting?

Tree of Codes: Making Of

2011-03-11T05:55:00.000-08:00

Publisher Visual Editions has posted this delightful video that shows the process behind the printing of Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book, Tree of Codes. It's fascinating to see the stages that go into a work like this. I love Visual Editions not only because they are committed to making beautiful books that do fascinating things with the very materiality of books, but also because they seem to be genuinely interested in sharing the process of making such books. It's well worth your time to check this out.

FFVII Disc 2 Sector 104001

2011-03-05T06:35:00.000-08:00

SE.....).KNO.W.T
HE..RI.A.RIGHT..
..).HAVE..IT.STO
R..IN.A.SAF.E.PL
ACE.....&OLLO.W.
ME....0.HEW.PERF

Good and Evil

2011-03-04T06:03:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting post on the blog Overthinking It about good and evil in videogames, looking specifically at how the concepts are implemented in Grand Theft Auto and the Zelda games. I think it's well worth reading, and really gets into some of the issues that are often overlooked when discussing morality in videogames.

It's interesting to see the number of games in which players engage in near-genocidal behaviours (classics such as the aforementioned Zelda games as well as the Mario series, as well as any number of other games that helped create the popular notion that games are for kids) that are generally regarded as innocent or harmless, while GTA is roundly criticised for destroying civilisation as we know it. Where is the criticism of Civilisation, which tends to see wiping competing nations off the map as merely a part of life? Or the focus on FPS war games, rather than games featuring diplomatic solutions to conflict? Gaming features many games that hold unacceptable behaviour close to their hearts, yet which usually go unnoticed.

That said, as one of the commenters on the Overthinking It rightfully notes, GTA generally presents you with two options: do evil and progress through the main narrative, or be good and grow bored. This is especially obvious when you look at the game map, which only unlocks new portions as you move through the main narrative. Good people aren't even allowed downtown in GTA VI--that type of behaviour is simply not considered a valid way through the game.

Ultimately, I think it would be interesting to see a game that presents you with both good and evil options, but that does so in understated way that the GTA series (or for that matter, The Sims) does. As much as I love my Bioware games, they tend to present you with moments in which you must make a choice between good and evil, then let you go back to killing orcs and aliens with reckless abandon and with little influence on your overall goodness or evilness. What if your moment-to-moment behaviours were the deciding ones? Or would such a game even be possible? What would the morality look like? Would it be based on clearly-defined rules limited by what the coding can and cannot detect? Regardless, I'd like to see someone try.

Cryptography

2011-02-26T17:12:00.000-08:00

Dada encryption: burn the pencil and paper into oblivion before writing the message. Throw the ashes at a homing pigeon.

Tree of Codes

2011-02-15T04:25:00.000-08:00

Derek Beaulieu reviews Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, with mixed results. The review is best summed up in the following excerpt:

As radical as Tree of Codes may look on the surface, it belies a traditional sensibility which undermines the project as a whole. Foer has chosen as his source text Bruno Schultz’s short story collection Street of Crocodiles, his “favorite book.” This selection reflects not upon a latent text within Street of Crocodiles, nor upon a potential commentary upon Schultz’s biography or bibliography, but rather simply upon Foer’s own personal aesthetic. Tree of Codes is, then, Foer’s love letter to Schultz’s oeuvre. An excision text like Tree of Codes is based entirely on the quality of the writer’s choices: her ability to choose an initial text and style of writing / creation which is both uncanny and self-contained. In the best examples in this genre the resultant text is dictated by, and comments upon, the source text. There should be some awareness, some commentary, some self-reflection, on the process of moving the source text into the recombinant resultant text. Tree of Codes, sadly, is not an example of (as Craig Dworkin defines Conceptual writing) “a writing in which the idea cannot be separated from the writing itself: in which the instance of writing is inextricably intertwined with the idea of Writing: the material practice of écriture.” Foer has merely mined one straight-forward narrative for yet another straight-forward narrative.

I have not yet finished reading my copy of Tree of Codes, but I can certainly see how Beaulieu reached this conclusion. The type of conceptual writing Beaulieu points to is difficult to compose, as it requires a great deal of attention to detail on the part of the author. It is much easier to come up with a fun or fetching visual conceit that frames the narrative but does not engage with it. Regardless, I look forward to finishing Foer's latest in the near future, and will certainly reconsider Beaulieu's post in my own review.

Left 4 Dead, left behind

2011-02-12T16:16:00.000-08:00

I blogged about negative social interactions in Left 4 Dead last week. In that post, I argued that sometimes games need a little negativity and misanthropy to shake things up, so long as it's consistent with the narrative thrust of the game. It makes sense, I stated, that some players would turn on the weak, as that is true to the social forces in play in such a scenario.

Here's where I make a confession: when I wrote that post, I'd not played much Left 4 Dead in multiplayer. The majority of my experience, in fact, was entirely single player. This past week, however, I was able to squeeze in a few games, during which I encountered a rather frustrating feature of the game. I was part-way through the No Mercy level in a Survival game when a window popped up asking players to vote as to whether or not I should be booted from the game. I confess that I'm not the greatest player in the world, but by no means did I think I was doing so poorly as to deserved to be booted. Indeed, all I can figure is that someone took offence to the fact that I missed while throwing a Molotov cocktail, trapping us momentarily in a room. The players voted two in favour, one against, for booting me, and I found myself back in the lobby.

Now, I'm not terribly sore that I was booted. I find it odd that only two of the four players on my team were able to kick me out, but I guess that if all four players had a vote there would be more than a few ties. What does annoy me, however, is the fact that Valve would allow players to boot another gamer out through such an extra-diegetic mechanism as the one I encountered.

If there ever is a zombie outbreak, there is one fact that the survivors will have to deal with: they will not like all their fellow survivors. Unfortunately for those survivors, however, there will be no mechanism through which they can boot the annoying survivors. Indeed, if they ever hope to rid themselves of the more aggravating members of their motley crew, they'll have to resort to leaving them behind, tricking them into being eaten by zombies, or possibly simply killing them. They will have to be dealt with directly and personally, rather than simply just unplugged from the situation, with life continuing on afterwards as if nothing happened. There will be consequences.

I think that Left 4 Dead loses a lot by allowing this option, rather than encouraging characters to take matters into their own hands diegetically. Truthfully, the booted/dead player will be just as upset either way, so I'd much rather players have to face the fact that they just betrayed a fellow human than simply be able to vote offending players off the island, so to speak. So much else in the game encourages direct human interaction, so it's disappointing to see this jarring break with that paradigm.

Ultimately, I wonder what Jenova Chen's take on this would be. Here's hoping one day I get the chance to ask him.

Cooking the Books

2011-02-11T18:19:00.002-08:00

Tonight was my department's annual potluck, Cook the Books. All of the dishes are based in some way on works of literature, most frequently involving terrible puns. My dish was Oreopagitica, delicious, cupcake-sized Oreo cheesecakes. Here's the card I printed to explain the dish.

Floppy disc pipe organ

2011-02-10T05:16:00.000-08:00

Kobo

2011-02-09T04:41:00.000-08:00

It's been well over nine months since I bought my Kobo ereader, so it's probably time for me to post that review I promised back in May. I'll state up front that my experiences with it are mixed, but largely positive. Although ereaders have been out in one form or another for ages, I think it's only now that we're finally seeing devices that are suitable for a general market. Not only have eReaders standardised themselves, such that there is now a basic feature set, but readers have developed a sense of what to expect from eReaders, and know whether the eReader they're buying is worth the cost.

What I think I like most about Kobo is the way they've made such an easy, workable cross-platform experience. There are a number of places to read Kobo ebooks: the Kobo website, the Kobo desktop application, the Kobo iPhone/iPad/Blackberry app, and the Kobo eReader. What makes this option so workable, though, is that Kobo automatically synchronises your books across each of these reading venues. If I read to page 112 on my lunch break from their web browser, say, I will start at page 112 on my phone when I'm reading on the street car. This, to me, demonstrates that Kobo understands the way people read, squeezing pages in here and there, as time permits. Kobo also understands the flexibility ebooks offer, and is willing to experiment with new ways of interacting with books to best fit the way readers use them. It's not perfect--for example, the first-generation Kobo eReader lacks wireless, and as such only synchs when it's plugged into a computer--but it is clear Kobo is invested in making ebooks work on their own terms, rather than simply building a print-like publishing model.

Another thing I quite love about Kobo is their willingness to keep improving their software and devices as time goes on. Since buying my Kobo eReader, for example, Kobo has released a series of updates that not only fixed some small bugs (such as fixed-size ePubs that would not allow the font to be resized over what appeared to be 8pt type), but Kobo has also introduced new functionality. Kobo has added the ability to subscribe to newspapers and magazines, and has also added the ability to look words up in a dictionary. Smart phone users can now also highlight passages and add notes to books, as well as share quotations and other book-related information via Kobo's just-released social media options.

This, however, brings me to a point I find somewhat frustrating about the eReader. Because Kobo was the first company to release an eReader in the $150 price range, their eReader also cuts the most costs. Unlike the Kindle, there is no keyboard on the Kobo, so features like highlighting and note-taking are restricted to smart phone
users, as are the social media options. Likewise, users who waited a few months to buy their Kobo were able to buy a wireless edition, which greatly improves the Kobo's usability with regards to synchronising your library across all devices. Whereas this is obviously a hardware issue and cannot be resolved with a quick firmware update, it does clash with Kobo's otherwise-consistent dedication to constantly improving their product. As an early adopter, I should not be surprised by this, but it is somewhat frustrating nonetheless. My hope is, however, that this dedication to improvement will continue with regards to hardware, and that future iterations of the Kobo will better anticipate future functionality, allowing Kobo to make the most of their commitment to continually improving their software.

Ultimately, the Kobo functions wonderfully as an eReader, and Kobo's entire publishing model is probably the one most committed to providing their readers with a reading experience tailored to the unique opportunities allowed by ebooks. Whereas their hardware isn't as slick as Amazon's, and lacks some major features like the keyboard, I much prefer Kobo's dedication to reading across devices to Amazon's proprietary deathgrip.

Tetris

2011-02-05T07:03:00.000-08:00

I was reading Ian Bogost's Unit Operations the other day and was quite taken by a passage in which Bogost quotes Janet Murray's discussion of the narrative in Tetris. Murray states that

Tetris is a perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s--of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught.

At first blush, it is easy to see Murray's reading as reaching, as not actually grounded in anything "real." The less-charitable would conclude that Murray's reading is nothing more than academic fluff. Indeed, Markku Eskelinnen is none to impressed:

It would be equally far beside the point if someone interpreted chess as a perfect American game because there's a constant struggle between hierarchically organized white and black communities, genders are not equal, and there's no health care for the stricken pieces. Of course, there's one crucial difference: after this kind of analysis you'd have no intellectual future in the chess-playing community.

And yet Murray's reading holds currency in popular culture. I regularly refer to the act of organising a large number of objects into a small space as "tetrising," as do most of the people I know. The comic The Perry Bible Fellowship plays with this metaphor in the comic below:

The Simpsons, too, have played with this idea:

I find it compelling to see Murray's interpretation borne out in the popular imagination. This demonstrates the degree to which players not only think about games long after they've played them, but also relate those games to their lives in useful and innovative ways. Tetris isn't just a game to play while killing time; it's become a part of our day-to-day lives.

It's right there in the name

2011-02-03T07:53:00.000-08:00

I very much love all the work thatgamecompany has done, and believe them to be some of the most compelling game designers around today. Their game Flower is a wonderful example of a game that foregrounds emotional reaction over a slavish adherence to contrived goals, and their new game Journey looks like it will head even further in this direction. The developers, artists, and programmers all seem committed to this vision, and I look forward to seeing them learn and grow with each new game.

I must say, however, that I was surprised when I read an interview with thatgamecompany's Creative Director, Jenova Chen. In this interview, Chen discusses his experiences playing Valve's game Left 4 Dead online. Chen found that frequently people would kill him and take his health pack, rather than work together with him to fight off the zombie attacks. He feels that this is a flaw in the game, as it's supposed to be about teamwork. It's true that Left 4 Dead is primarily a cooperative game, but it seems to me that Chen's experiences fit in quite nicely with what the game is about.

Left 4 Dead is a game about survival following a zombie apocalypse. And at the heart of it, any story of survival in a zombie-filled world is a story about humanity. By killing Chen and stealing his medical supplies, the players in his group were simply acting out the parts of brutal utilitarian survivalists. They saw him as dragging the group down and felt that his medical supplies were of more value to them than his life. Sure, we might find this type of thinking abhorrent, but it does not break with mood of the game (look at the title--what would Left 4 Dead be if someone weren't left for dead every once in a while?) and it can in fact enhance everyone's experience of the game. When you're thrown together in a group with people you don't know due to extreme circumstance, you have no way of knowing whether you should trust them with your life, and it turns out that there are indeed people you shouldn't trust.

I realise that Chen likely also had a number of negative experiences that informed his displeasure with these types of online games, so I don't want to ignore those. I myself got bored of playing Battlefield on the PS3 after a teenage boy high on Mountain Dew and the anonymity of the Internet told me to "stop sitting around scratching my gay balls," a phrase I didn't realise held currency in the second World War. I heartily endorse Chen's attempts to build a game that stops gamers from abusing one another in this way; at the same time, however, I think that we need to be careful and acknowledge that there are certain behaviours that may appear to be negative/griefing, but that actually make a good deal of sense given the context of the game. Sometimes a little misanthropy is exactly what a game needs.

Composition No 1

2010-11-14T16:53:00.000-08:00

I'm currently writing on Robert Coover's Heart Suit, and thought it might be helpful to look into Marc Saporta's Composition No 1, as each text is, at the heart, a collection of loose fragments of story, meant to be shuffled and read in any order. Interestingly enough, a quick Google search turned up far fewer results than I would've expected. That said, the situation is not nearly so grim as the one Nick Montfort encountered when he first searched for Composition No 1 back in 2002.

One of the links, however, piqued my interest: Visual Editions, a wonderful British publisher who specialises in beautiful books in which the design is a foremost narratological element, is currently working on a new edition of Composition No 1. This will be their third publication, following on a re-imagined version of the classic Tristram Shandy and the latest work by Jonathan Safran Foer.

I'm pleased to see a publisher working to get such beautiful books out in wide circulation. Frequently, books like this are published in limited runs by small presses and rarely leave the country of origin (or even city of origin, for some of the smallest presses). I felt lucky enough already to get my hands on Anne Carson's powerful Nox, and never would have imagined that 2010 would be the year of the beautiful book. These are magical times we live in.

Design as communication

2010-09-23T07:02:00.000-07:00

A friend passed this link on to me, and I found myself immediately taken by it. There has been much reporting on the Chilean mining disaster, but none of them were able to communicate the magnitude of the situation as well as this simple printout. This is one of those cases where good design is able to better communicate the experience of the trapped miners than any amount of photos, video, and interviews might.

Things Fall Apart

2010-07-27T05:10:00.000-07:00

The courthouse, like the church, was built a little way outside the village. The footpath that linked them was a very busy one because it also led to the stream, beyond the court. It was open and sandy. Footpaths were open and sandy in the dry season. But when the rains came the bush grew thick on either side and closed in on the path. It was now dry season.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

2010-07-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

The leprous company of his sins closed about him, breathing upon him, bending over him from all sides. He strove to forget them in an act of prayer, huddling his limbs closer together and binding down his eyelids: but the senses of his soul would not be bound and, though his eyes were shut fast, he saw the places where he had sinned and, though his ears were tightly covered, he heard. He desired with all his will not to hear or see. He desired till his frame shook under the strain of his desire and until the senses of his soul closed. They closed for an instant and then opened. He saw.

A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle-bunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggling upwards from all the ordure through the bristling grey-green weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.

Creatures were in the field: one, three, six: creatures were moving in the field, hither and thither. Goatish creatures with human faces, hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as india-rubber. The malice of evil glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved hither and thither, trailing their long tails behind them. A rictus of cruel malignity lit up greyly their old bony faces. One was clasping about his ribs a torn flannel waistcoat, another complained monotonously as his beard stuck in the tufted weeds. Soft language issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terrific faces...

That's a good question

2010-05-31T06:47:00.000-07:00

I've picked up a Kobo ereader, so as to avoid buying the dozens of books I have to read this summer for my comprehensive exams (feel free to read along!), and am currently working on a review. In the meantime, however, you should read this delightful article in which writers ask themselves and then answer the questions they always wish they'd be asked.

Truly an overlooked archetype

2010-05-19T19:38:00.000-07:00

Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde
With rosted flessh, or milk and wastel breed;
But soore wepte she if oon of hem were deed,
Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte,
And al was conscioence and tendre herte.

--A description of the Prioresse in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Some things never change. There have, apparently, always been those people who treat their dogs like royalty, no matter how nasty the little things may be. Clearly this is an overlooked archetype. Jung has some explaining to do.

The art of the book

2010-05-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a link of some beautiful examples of fore-edge painting, the lost art of including an image that can only be seen when the fore-edge of a book is fanned out somewhat. Just like the tooltip punchline in many of today's webcomics, the fore-edge painting rewards the careful reader who examines every element of the printed book.

Art imitating life imitating art

2010-05-18T04:46:00.000-07:00

I'm putting together some thoughts on this weekend's Book Camp TO, but a larger post has been delayed by the crushign realities of grad school. In the meantime, I invite you to look at this compelling blog post that explores how the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was influenced by the existing mythology surrounding Chernobyl. This article contains some important advice for writers in any medium: always leave room for your subject to speak back to you, and be open to what it says. While you may feel that you've developed the perfect plot, found the perfect setting, and have conjured up the perfect characters, remember to be open to the influences of the real world they're based on. Nothing makes a story as compelling as seeing resonances of it in the world around us.

Hit and pun

2010-05-14T19:39:00.000-07:00

I've got to be up bright and early tomorrow morning for BookCamp TO, so you'll have to be content with this delightful pun.

So you want to start a webcomic

2010-05-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

Jeph Jacques, the creator of Questionable Content, posted an easy-to-follow list of the steps you should take when creating a webcomic. Jeph is one of the savviest webcomic creators out there, and his posts on the business aspects of webcomics are always helpful both to those who are trying to break into webcomics as well as those Book Historians (like myself) interested in studying the business of webcomics.

Colossal Type

2010-05-12T20:06:00.000-07:00

Cameron Moll, a designer from Florida, has created the beautiful poster of the Roman Coliseum that you see above. The entire image is composed from typographical elements, including letters, numbers, swashes, and other such characters. The site also includes a detailed (if highly sped up) video of the creation of one of the glyphs used in this poster.

Flash, HTML5, and PDF: which will we use to read our documents?

2010-05-11T06:24:00.001-07:00

As the public watches Apple and Adobe clash over support of Flash on the iPhone and iPad, a number of web-based companies have been scurrying around trying to alternatives to Flash, attempting to capture the iPhone market. YouTube, for example, has long been iPhone compatible, despite once having been the most prominent Flash-based video sites on the internet. Now Scribd, the online document site, has decided to move away from Flash, now displaying documents in HTML5, which should work in most major browsers.

Where Scribd originally used Flash to display PDF documents to readers, they have now developed a way to use HTML5 to display those same PDF documents. Scribd has posted an explanation of the benefits of displaying PDFs in HTML5, and has made that document viewable both in the new HTML5 format as well as the old Flash format, so that you can see the differences between the two for yourself.

By and large, HTML5 seems to be a great way to display PDFs online. It is clean and faster than Flash or Adobe's browser-based PDF reader, and, as the Scribd overview points out, it allows you to used browser-based search features, rather than Adobe's clunky controls. Unfortunately, however, HTML5 delivers a significantly less uniform presentation than Flash or the browser-based PDF reader. In Google Chrome, my webrowser of choice, there are a number of kerning issues, and characters often overlap, as you can see in the uppermost image. Some other characters do not display properly, such as the 5 in HTML5, which appears in a different font in Chrome. Internet Explorer, however, encounters none of these issues, as we see in the image below.
It is only a matter of time before Google fixes this hiccup, but in the meantime it does raise valid questions about the kinds of problems we may encounter in the future if we switch over entirely to markup-language-based solutions. Does this hearken the return of the "Best viewed in Internet Explorer X or later" images that populated the web in the late 90s and early 2000s?

Ultimately, this is an important development to keep an eye on, as it will shape the way that authors of digital texts create their works. HTML5 certainly seems to offer the most flexibility, but it may also limit an author's audience to only those who are using the "proper" browser.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival

2010-05-10T08:12:00.001-07:00

This past weekend was the Toronto Comics Art Festival, and it was a wonderful, well-organised event. The festival took place in the Toronto Reference Library, and featured well over a hundred artists, many Canadian but also a number of American and British artists. Not only were the artists selling their works and signing things for fans, they were also participating in a series of panels, consisting of everything from spotlights on particular artists to topics such as social media and comics or comics and research.

My favourite panel of the weekend was entitled "Tracers, photoshoppers, cut & pasters," and featured artists whose works incorporate one of the aforementioned techniques. The panelists included Ryan North, David Malki, Shannon Gerard, Emily Horne, and Sonja Ahlers. It was a lively panel that covered a lot of ground, and thankfully the people at RGB Filter recorded the event, so I should be able to post a link to the complete video sometime in the next few days.

I was especially pleased to see Sonja Ahlers in the panel, as I had encountered her book Fatal Distractions back when I worked at Chapters, but stupidly never bought it (one of the paradoxes of working in a bookstore while working on a degree in English is that you see thousands of books you want to buy but will never have the time to read). Thankfully, I got a chance to correct my error this weekend, when I picked it up as well as Sonja's just-released work The Selves. Sonja's work is a poignantly poetic combination of bricolaged image and text that invites repeat viewings and proves more rewarding with each reading. I highly recommend either work.

For those in Toronto, Sonja Ahlers will be holding a launch party for The Selves this Thursday, the 13th, at the Magic Pony Artshop and Gallery (694 Queen St W) from 6pm to 9pm. Come by and check it out.

Not reading

2010-01-19T02:45:00.001-08:00

"I’ve become so accustomed to not reading that I don’t even read what appears before my eyes. It’s not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear."
--Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

Digital tourism

2009-09-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

Consider this another post about Dan Brown-related tourism. The webpage freemason.org has been crippled by an influx of The Lost Symbol-inspired visitors.

Regardless of how you may feel about Brown's work, this does provide a fascinating window into the reading habits of his audience. Clearly, Brown's readers do not simply passively consume the works, but rather they research the background material by going straight to the source. Whether the readers follow up on this research or not is difficult to say, but regardless, this influx of traffic proves that his readers see the book as something to interact with.

Monetizing

2009-09-17T06:34:00.000-07:00

Whereas many of the places featured in Dan Brown's previous two books, The da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, are not always overjoyed with the attention they've received on account of the books, Washington, DC, the subject of Brown's latest novel, is taking it in stride.

After tweeting a link to an article on The Lost Symbol on the @buchstauben Twitter account, we received a reply from @washingtondc telling us to "Be sure to check out the many places in DC that inspired the book!http://bit.ly/ZGdiN." Clearly the tourism board there has caught on that being mentioned in on Brown's quasi-historical thrillers is a good thing, so far as promotion and advertising is concerned.

Will reading The Lost Symbol be as fun without all the outrage? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Literary tourism

2009-09-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol is out now, and the locations featured in the book are already bracing themselves for the influx of tourists.

This will undoubtedly lead to a lot of complaining about the accuracy of Brown's historical "facts" and the validity of his plot, especially given that, despite being clearly marked as fiction, many readers will take good portions of the book as fact.

I wonder, though, whether we out to be encouraging a culture of book-based tourism? Perhaps, instead of scorning Brown's tourist trade, we ought to nurture a tourist trade in other books. We already have Bloomsday in Dublin, so why not encourage similar outings for other good books? Don't let Dan Brown have all the fun.

Have an idea for a book-based tour? Let us know in the comments.

An appeal to the senses

2009-09-09T05:12:00.000-07:00

When talking to people about whether ebooks will ever become a major market force, they often mention something about the physical sensation of paper books as a major factor in the continued dominance of print. It's always something that ebooks can't replicate: the touch, the smell, the character a well-worn book develops after years of faithful service. While these are all perfectly good reasons to love print books (all reasons that I, too, love print books), they remind me of the arguments circulating when digital distribution of music first really started to take off.

Back in the early 2000s, I was working at a record store in Sherwood Park, Alberta. This, of course, was right around the time that people were seriously considering buying their music digitally. As such, customers and co-workers would often discuss with me the relative merits of albums and downloads: "Digital files are missing the beautiful artwork," some would say, while others would remark that they would "never be able to go without the liner notes." In all cases, the physical object was being fetishised.

Now this should sound somewhat familiar. When physical album sales started taking a hit, their proponents immediately began praising the physicality of the medium as one of its greatest selling points. And now, when ebooks look like they might be breaking out, these same arguments are appearing in publishing circles. This isn't to say that things will work exactly the same for the book market, but I think it's important for us to consider the fact that many, many music fans now acquire their music through digital distribution channels.

Indeed, perhaps it's time for us to stop thinking about what ebooks can't do, and to start thinking about what they can do.