In summary – Jaron spends the book pointing out how technology sometimes exhibits unanticipated negative pressure on society. A solid example he uses is the Facebook relationship status – with only five options to choose from, it forces people to pigeonhole themselves into categories arbitrarily concocted by a developer somewhere, rather than allowing people to express their relationship (from the full range of human relationships) in the terms they prefer. There’s a subtle backchannel message going on that says “Here are the categories that society has deemed normal and acceptable, and if you can’t pick one you don’t belong.” The same goes for gender (which seems to be a contentious issue lately), sexuality, political stripes, etc, etc. Humans are very rarely easily categorized into neat boxes.

He’s definitely on to something, and the book is chock-a-block full of powerful and interesting observations about technology’s impact on creativity, freedom, economics, that really opened my eyes to the subtle effects of interfaces that even I, as a UI designer, take for granted. However! While I see where he’s coming from on a number of issues, the conclusions he draws are rarely compelling. I had a really hard time reading this book, because whatever starts off as a neat humanist observation ends up degenerating into a 10-paragraph disorganized rant around the point, sometimes further devolving into a wordy tirade about the singularity. At times I felt I was swimming around in an ocean of argument without any really solid conclusions.

Maybe he’s not the greatest writer in the world – I think a lot of the problems I had with the book could have been fixed by a good editor forcing him to consolidate his arguments. (And to stop name-dropping mercilessly!) He’s a very bright man – I think he raises a lot of really interesting issues in his book, but it’s a bit of effort to get at some of them.

The burgers are pretty great! Their fresh-ground paddies are beefy, not too seasoned, thick and juicy without being so huge you can’t finish one. It’s served up on a good quality bun, too, which is a big bonus. I don’t know if I’d drive across the city for one, but if you’re in the neighborhood and hungry you’re going to find a better burger here than any of the fast food joints, and they’re considerably more affordable than The Works. I heard that the Vera Sauce is crazy delicious, but I played it straight up on my first visit with my usual toppings. (Ketchup, Mustard, Relish, Tomato, Lettuce, Cheese)

Since Vera’s is inside a butcher’s shop, skip the fries and grab one of the bucher’s prepared stuffed baked potatoes – they’re only like a dollar and they’re delicious. Wendy’s has nothing on this place.

Because the burgers are grilled to order, you’ll have a few minutes wait. They have a paper form you fill out with your name and burger preferences and they’ll call you out when your food’s ready. It’s hilarious to mess with the form – they played along and called me out as Captain Awesome. Fun staff!

]]> http://lunarbovine.com/blog/2012/05/veras-burger-shack/feed/ 0 http://lunarbovine.com/blog/2012/04/quick-movie-reviews-2/ http://lunarbovine.com/blog/2012/04/quick-movie-reviews-2/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:16:14 +0000 jcobill http://lunarbovine.com/blog/?p=2225 The Hunger Games (Awesome Yay!) : The film adaptation was pretty close to the book – I agreed very much with the editorial decisions to drop a lot of the introspective plot stuff in favour of the action, although it would have been nice to spend more time in District 12 and getting a feel for the world. Overall it was pretty fun! Jennifer Lawrence is great as Katniss and she hands out a proper amount of whuppins. (Most of the violence is handled off-camera, which I found sortof disappointing given how central the shocking gore was to the theme of the book)

The production design was hit and miss. I found the tech and costumes and sets lacked a cohesive vision and often felt cheap and mixed up. The camera was absurdly shaky, to the point where even I (who normally doesn’t mind) was getting uncomfortable. I get that the handheld shaky camera is supposed to lend a dynamic, action, ‘cinema verité’ look to the film, but it was awful. Directors: please stop asking for this!

Wrath of the Titans (Fun Spectacle!): Movies like this are why I still go to movie theatres. Sam Worthington runs around fighting stuff in this very linear video-gamey movie about the last dying breaths of the Greek Gods. There’s not a lot to it, truth be told, beyond the swordfighting and monsters (and an unlikely romance), but it makes a pretty great spectacle film! The effects are terrific, and I thought they made really effective use of the 3D cameras. The scene where Cronus erupts out of Tartarus as a giant lava-covered demon was particularly gorgeous – kudos to the effects team that made this movie look incredible.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Sooooo boring) : This one’s been on my renter list for ages, so I finally got around to watching it and was bored to tears. I fast-fowarded a chunk of the film looking for anything to shake up the pace, but no – it drones on for the full 119 minutes. This is my second Wes Anderson disappointment (I hated the Darjeeling Express) and I’m wondering if he and I are just on different levels or something. I enjoy cerebral films – and there’s a lot to like about his work. I love his shot compositions, and I think he has a real talent for evoking emotional, honest performances. It’s too bad nothing ever happens in his movies. Magnificently dull. I want my hour and a half back.

Multi-billionaire creator of the VR Oasis, James Halliday, has passed away and left his enormous fortune to anyone who can solve the mysterious 80’s-themed puzzles he’s left behind. An subculture of obsessive clue-hunters forms, and teenaged Wade Watts, who’s been steeped in 80’s ephemera through his childhood, is single-mindedly devoted to solving Halliday’s labyrinthian mystery.

I want to give this one a glowing recommendation, but I think the audience who will take as much from it as I did are a really thin slice of the population. If you dig 80’s nostalgia, retro video games, and science fiction, this is a brilliant narrative that draws from all kinds of amazing reference material that tingles all the right nerve centers. But it’s a love it or hate it thing – I could see this book becoming an unbearable slog to someone who didn’t get the references, particularly if they were born too late to have lived any of it. I think the title is pretty clever – I suspect you can know from the outset if it’s for you.

The action scenes, mostly set in the VR world, are epic and hilarious. Despite the nerdy tone of the book, there’s quite a lot of good character development and a few twists to keep things interesting, including an ongoing virtual romance that Wade worries may not be what it appears.

A few beefs with the book – the characters have an implausible recollection of the most obscure 80’s details – having actually lived that decade firsthand I could scarcely remember most of the references and a bunch of it went way over my head. It hardly matters though – the clues are so vague and specific to situations in the book, that they’re impossible to solve until the characters work out their significance. I would have liked to play along!

Secondly, during a plot twist in the latter half of the book, Wade gets into some serious trouble, but suddenly starts magically exhibiting superhuman hacking skills that, while convenient for driving the story forward, seemed incredibly unlikely given everything we knew about him to that point. That bit of the story is entertaining, but I kept wondering what other magical skills he was going to manifest next time he was in trouble.

Overall a terrific read – it’s an early lead for my book of the year!

Here’s the bad news: if you’ve read anything else by Coupland, this book treads over the same well-worn paths. A bunch of quirky individuals, an apocalyptic situation, visions, questioned faith,  social disorders, all territory he’s already covered in ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’, ‘jPod’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Generation X’. It felt like he’d lifted characters, chapters, and plot points from all of his previous books, ran them through a computer program that shuffles their traits, and then dumped out a novel synthesized from all his usual tropes. Even the autistic hugging machine (from jPod) makes in in fully intact.

Don’t get me wrong – I like his writing and think he’s quite clever, but this book did nothing for me and brought nothing new to the table. Hated it.

I’m going to turn the dagger just a bit more while I’m here skewering his masterpiece. After Michael Ignatieff, Margaret Atwood and Stephen Lewis’ amazing Massey Lectures about profoundly important, interesting subjects, reading a story about some people stuck in an airport was a disappointment. I’ve heard Douglas Coupland in person and he’s super articulate and interesting – if they’d just sat him down and asked him about his passion for public spaces, or his interest in west coast architecture and culture, he could have filled an hour with really interesting ramblings. Heck – I’ve paid to see it.

The problem was I was moving around a lot in my 20s, and National Geographic have been making magazines for a long time – the size of my collection was becoming enormous and it was becoming increasingly impractical to heft the crates full of (heavy) yellow magazines everywhere I was going. Downsizing to a smaller apartment, I had to accept that there just wasn’t room for 10 feet of magazines on a 4 foot shelf. I let them go in the hopes that someday they’d be available online or something…

Enter the Complete National Geographic – a collection that takes up only the space on your hard drive, and gives you access to the entire history of the magazine, without gaps, dating back to the beginning. I picked mine up at Costco for a steal – $24. (It’s offered online for $50)

I think it’s a fantastic collection that have been digitized well, but I have some minor quibbles about the custom Adobe Air browser. More than a few times pages have mysteriously failed to load, without error messages or any indication if it’s doing something. While bookmarking is somewhat handy, some of the UI feels clunky and unintuitive, and there’s often no “cancel” button in case you change your mind.

I suspect that they did all of the scanning directly from the printed magazine, which is a shame since there’s probably a drawer (or a building) someplace packed with all the crisp, bright original photos. The ones in the collection are still beautiful, but show some age in the colour reproduction and screening technique.

The future came through for me on this one! It’s pretty rad that we can fit 1400+ magazines on a millimetre-thin disc! Now, where’s my flying car?

Delicious! And only like ten million calories!

Press Pause Play brings together a number of notable speakers who pontificate on the “democratization of culture” that we’re witnessing while all the pillars of traditional media (newspapers, television, radio) come crashing down thanks to Youtube and podcasts and ever-lowering barriers to entry. It’s worth checking out!

The documentary is put together in a slightly uneven way – we take detours from interesting subjects so the editors can interject some pointless slow-mo concert-crowd shots and bits of found-footage experimental nonsense for aesthetics sake. We see planes. We see city skylines. We see flying triangle particles and blob meshes. There should be a drinking game based around every time the camera does a slow push in on the back of some headphone-wearing kid’s head.

Draaaaank!

There are definitely big changes happening – for better and for worse. And I agree that you can’t trust crowdsourcing to choose your culture for you. (Now sitting at 35 million views, Niki Minaj’s youtube record-setting “Stupid Hoe” video is a vapid, seizure-inducing heap of popular dreck.) But I don’t think that tearing down some of the establishment is a bad thing – decades of consolidation in radio by companies like Clear Channel have severely restricted local programming, choking out young fresh artists and local musicians in favour of endless loops of Aerosmith’s greatest hits. Thank goodness the internet came along when it did – probably 90% of the stuff I listen to is from obscure bands I only found thanks to pitchfork, iTunes, hypeMachine and people’s mashup blogs.

A few choice quotes:

“…  it’s a reality that many people don’t like, [...] most people don’t have talent. So for a serious young film-maker, these are very depressing times. When you leave everything to the crowd, when everything becomes democratized, where everything is determined by the number of clicks, you are by definition undermining the seriousness of the artistic endeavor.” – Andrew Keen

“If everyone’s a musician, and everybody is making mediocre music, eventually the world is just covered in mediocrity. And people start to become comfortable with mediocrity. And that to me is the danger.” – Moby

And of course, you can’t film a documentary without a bit of outrageous hyperbole:

“There’s no evidence that we’re on the verge of a great new cultural age, if there’s any evidence, [...] we may be on the verge of a new dark age in cultural terms. A new collapse of Constantinople. Where the creative world is destroyed. And where all we have is cacophany and self-opinion. Where we have a crisis of democratized culture.” – Andrew Keen

Woman in Black: Creepy! Harry Potter plays a grownup widower lawyer who has to go to a haunted house to sort through an old lady’s papers. The house is magnificently creepy and full of freaky victorian-era ephemera (a museum’s collection worth of wind-up monkeys, clowns and porcelain dolls). At first the director is patient enough to let the house and it’s creepy noises get under our skin, but then he resorts to the jumping-out-at-you-with-loud-noises cheap scares. Overall it was well put together, it’s got plenty of disturbing moments and creepy visuals, but I really felt the BOO! tactics were lazy and the film could have been much more menacing if handled in a subtler way. (I just discovered, incidentally, that this is a remake of a 1989 made-for-tv movie, which in turn was an adaptation of a stage play. Hollywood re-hash! *shakesfist*)

The Invention of Lying: Awful. I think the premise of this movie – that only one person in the world develops the capacity to lie, is super clever and amusing. Kindof the inverse of Liar Liar, where Jim Carrey can only tell the truth. But the execution is just terrible. I think Ricky Gervais (who wrote, directed, and starred) confused the notions of honesty and tact when they were putting this together. The opening act is a humiliating dinner where Jennifer Garner casually heaps insults on Ricky Gervais, followed up by his mother’s death, Jonah Hill’s suicide humor, and then his co-workers humiliate him, and he’s fired. HAHA! As far as comedies go, this one’s a stinker, and I regret not shutting it off halfway through.

Captain America: Fun! I had low expectations for Captain America, but actually really enjoyed the story about scrawny Steve Rogers juicing up on super-serum to fight the Red Skull and his uber-nazis. It takes a while before he comes out swinging, and when he finally gets going they gloss over his heroic exploits in a flashback montage. But when he finally gets to knocking heads onscreen towards the end of the film, the action scenes are pretty entertaining.

In hindsight, this piece is an obvious logical extension of the original painting. Van Gogh’s style calls out for this kind of treatment – it’s so full of energy and dynamism and spiralling brushwork. I wonder how something like this could be extended to his more demure work, or how other styles of paintings might express themselves.

Pointillist pieces presented as boiling, churning clouds of swarming dots? Impressionistic paint daubs oozing around umbrella-holding women and ballerinas? Dadaist art that crashes your computer and sets your battery on fire?