As droll as the coursework was – excepting an entertaining end-of-semester project where we had to dig as deep as possible into the life of a public figure – my “civic” reporting class had some particularly valuable information. I don’t even remember the actual name, but learning how to cover city councils, cops & courts, assemblies, etc. is a thoroughly exacting business and the people who can do it outside of the opinion section without drinking until their liver leads an open revolt should be applauded.

So I do find some fault in this TPM piece about the 9/11 tribunal arraignment because it spends 90% of it’s space talking about whether the judge was too nice and only 10% talking about what the hell actually happened. It’s not just that one. That’s the big line that everyone is running with.

This isn’t what I focused on.

It was the definition of success.

It’s difficult to put a finger on exactly what that writer is defining as success. He never says. Despite the inordinate duration, they did in fact get arraigned. Though he again never states a result.

I call that a success. A big success. Some asshole committed a crime, they threw his ass in jail and now he’s been arraigned for trial. You know, the way that works in this country. Or used to work.

Personally, I would see him tried at an international court. It just makes the most sense given that he is accused of an act of war (people often forget that terrorism is almost always such), and that is the historically appropriate venue.

But we are finally – finally – putting some sliver of a face of justice on this whole War On Something That Doesn’t Physically Exist, even if it is severely deformed.

That is a hell of a lot better off than we were when this whole sham “war” started – throwing a whole bunch of people, including this guy, into a hole, forever, without even a whiff of a trial. I for one would rather be backing up the truck to sham trials instead of barreling forward further into summary execution.

That’s success.

Let’s keep it up.

I don’t have the requisites to call myself a “gamer” anymore. That word has morphed, at least in the common usage, to refer to someone who is more a consumer of games than an avid player. There’s a flippancy about the games as interactive entities. Modern “gamers” are children of a twisted multiplayer-based culture that seems far less interested in an engaging story, involved task completion or pure fun.

We’ve devolved to the old arcade days, where beating strangers to the high score trumps actual enjoyment.

Only now, they switch out the most popular game 20 times as quickly.

Richard Browne makes an excellent point about how the used game culture has been largely responsible for this development. While we speak to different ends, we share that much is lost when single-player experience becomes secondary to other concerns.

This of course causes me to turn my attention towards another realm with a comparably concerning trend of consumer use: the OS.

Think back to the first modern (Win95 and on) computer you owned. What was the first day like? What was one of the first few things that you did?

You changed the background.

It was a powerfully symbolic thing back in the day. That meant that this computer was yours and yours alone. As time progressed and everyone got more familiar with computers, the process became more complicated. Loading up favorite programs to rooting out manufacturer bloatware to installing a fresh OS copy to blanking the drive and installing Ubuntu. Not all of those are commonplace yet, but they could be.

Except for one big, lurking problem: apathy.

Though Browne doesn’t mention it, I can gleam that he’d agree that the current state of gaming and the current path of OSes have a whole lot to do with people being really fucking lazy. Take it from a really fucking lazy guy.

When I see someone holding an iPhone that’s pushing 5 different email accounts and has more than 100 apps in carefully managed groups, I see the same kind of person who is highly successful at online multiplayer FPS. Yes, you put a lot of effort into it, but you put a lot of effort into going down the simplest road possible.

It’s the difference between intellectual laziness (do not read as “stupid”) and physical laziness.

Me, I’d much prefer to jailbreak the phone and go through Cydia to find some truly useful applications so I could cut that number to 25. And I merely hold my own on online FPS because I won’t take the time to perfect the simplistic turn-aim-shoot skill – I’m more interested in spending 2 weeks perfectly positioning my FF characters’ skills and equipment for an upcoming battle slog.

The consequence of this sort of laziness gets us into the mess that they dare to call Windows 8 and the sold-as-security Gatekeeper of OSX Lion, which harbors the potential to bring iOS-style application control to the laptop/desktop environment. This is a path that leads to changing the background as not the first thing you do, but the only thing you can do without corporate approval.

Much like the fake outrage that surrounds every single Facebook design update, people know that their options are being forcefully limited by the designs of large companies hoping to milk them for every dollar possible – they just don’t do a damn thing about it.*

As bleak as it all looks right now and as high as my confidence is in people’s ability to apathetically slog through shit because the sand is burning their feet, I am quite hopeful that people on both fronts, gaming and computing, will come back around or at least find a superior alternative to the current state of affairs.

The numbers made me do it.

People keep saying Call of Duty: Black Ops is the best selling game of all time. Wrong. That accounts for dollars, not number of copies. Kicking the crap out of COD:BO’s measly 12 million units are games like SMB with 40 million, Mario Kart Wii with 32 million, Tetris with 35 million (100 million more on mobile phones) Brain Age for DS has 18 million, Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire for the short-lived Game Boy Advance even beat that number with 13 million (source).

Guess what’s common to all those games? Engaging story, involved task completion or pure fun.

The games story has been playing out for a long while now and the OS one is just getting started. If things continue on their current path, the less-than-2% sliver of the market that GNU Linux currently enjoys has nowhere to go but up.

At least, until the two bigs get the hint.

Everyone has an opinion on this case. Everyone.

And I do too. But that’s not what I want to talk about here and now.

I want to talk about the “Nanny State.”

Title 46, Chapter 776, section 13 of The 2011 Florida Statutes defines a citizen’s situational rights to use deadly force in “home protection.” Subsection 3 covers “any other place where he or she has a right to be.” The section is 561 words long. Pretty short. But you only have to go nine words into it – you don’t even have to leave the title – to find one very important word: fear.

Titles for sections of law are not chosen arbitrarily. They’re very specifically worded in order to reflect not only the content of the section but the spirit in which it is to be applied.

Read carefully, section 1 lays out the beef of the law. Section 2 limits its scope, section 3 is an inclusive addition, and the final two sections set definitions. Section 1 is the seat of the law. and its tenth word is “fear” – the second time that word is used.

What does that have to do with the “Nanny State?” It’s actually rather simple.

Yesterday I was reading about a conversation between Sean Hannity and Trayvon Martin’s attorney, Daryl Parks. Naturally, Hannity did his best to shape the conversation towards not blaming George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s killer.

Hannity, and others like him have specifically endorsed or praised the “stand your ground” laws.

It only takes a few moments of thought to figure out what is wrong with this picture.

There are few laws any more directly aimed at nannying than this one. It legislates emotions. It specifically states that persons in a certain set of circumstances (“A person is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm…”) did have a certain emotional reaction, and that the reaction was just.

I can just see a Mrs.-Doubtfire-looking woman holding Zimmerman, saying “It’s okay dearie, I know you were scared. It’s okay now.”

And this doesn’t qualify as nannying how?

Not nannying would be to let him be arrested and investigated in the case of Martin’s death. In fact, if the Sanford PD had done that, it’s incredibly unlikely that this would have become a national matter. But they didn’t. They asked him a few questions, they did a little role-play at the scene and then let him go. There is no way that this counts as treating like an adult a man you know for a fact just killed someone.

As yet, I have yet to hear a single justification of this position.

What does qualify as a nanny law in the previously referenced people’s minds? Giving birth control to women.

…I said I would not, but I do have one thing to say in reference to the specifics of this case.

What people are missing in the law is section 41. It renders section 13 inapplicable in the case of one who provokes initial use of force unless he or she “reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm.” We know for a fact that Zimmerman was told not to continue pursuit. If you can’t call his continued pursuit and exiting the vehicle while armed an “attack,” one can very reasonably argue provocation, given the lack of solid case law defining the concept in Florida.

As for the exception clause, the important word isn’t “reasonably.” It’s “believes.” Zimmerman knew he was armed. He knew that he was facing a teenager. If we were to grant that his account of the events is 100% true, he was at no time given any indication that Martin was carrying a weapon – he brandished one neither during the initial confrontation nor after Zimmerman’s came out. It’s a pretty tough sell that he believed that he would be killed or the victim of “great bodily harm,” because pulling a gun on an unarmed person tends to end that threat right quick.

As usual, I read with ever-increasing fury Matt Taibbi’s latest breakdown of how big banks (this time Bank of America’s evil was enough for a whole longread) are playing “spider just caught a couple flies” with absolutely everyone in the country, especially their customers.

This after end-to-end problems with the new Exchange server we’ve been trying to bring online for the last 3 weeks. Pick something. Anything. Yep, that went wrong. The only thing that has yet to fail is the hardware. If that happens, I’m lighting the little bastard on fire.

After banging my head against that wall (I am looking at a damn fine Wesley Willis Halloween costume if this keeps up), I started to see an eerie similarity between the two situations.

Facts:

1. Both are relatively new inventions built on a long history of hard work, expanded to maximize power and control
2. Both exert their power over their environment in such a way that forces others to conform to their way of doing things
3. Both exercise control schemes fundamentally different and often in conflict with those already in existence, to the detriment of those dependent upon them
4. Both are determined to do whatever they goddamn well please, whenever it goddamn well pleases them

It was at this point that one of my users asked me what was going on. The alphabet soup that I ladled out for them may as well have been rubber truck nuts in WD-40 for all the good it did to say out loud.

There’s no big secret why computers and finance are two of the most frequently practiced and least understood disciplines around. You have to speak gibberish to do either. Anyone can straighten their checking balance or set up a new email client/account. But they’re totally lost the second you start talking about repairing a bootloader or…uhh…fuck you, I’m not in finance, okay?

So I thought it would be quite amusing to make a game wherein people unfamiliar with either arena had to guess whether or not the jargon/acronym in a sentence belongs there. Easy example: “On Monday, the drivers for my FDICs stopped working and the server couldn’t connect to the Tubes.” Clearly that should be NICs – though broken banking insurance would have been less problematic for me at the time. Could be quite a fun game.

Then I remembered I don’t know anything about finance. I just know that Bank of America is staffed by gigantic dicks.

Back to fixing that server…

By being an even bigger shitshow.

As many know, today was the release of the Windows 8 “Consumer Preview” ISOs. For those of us who didn’t get in or didn’t have time for the beta testing, it’s the first real look at what has largely been lambasted by everyone except d-bag so-called “tech” writers who apparently get paid to talk about how great every new product is and add “‘power’ users may have a problem with [laundry list].”

And, yes, that was the exact same query run on general search, then news. Perhaps they got a different product?

Because I sure as shit did.

First off, what in the name of His Noodly Appendage does a fish have to do with Windows? And why is there a weird paper cutout fish on my initial install screen instead of some sort of explanation of what the hell is going on? The word “loading” would be nice at some point, because I’ve no clue whether anything is happening aside from the optical drive spinning.

That particular issue raised concern mostly because I was using an old, decommissioned machine and I wasn’t sure it would handle the OS well. Regular users might get worried no matter what they are working with.

But it installed nonetheless. Funny that they removed the time zone setting from that process all of a sudden. The non-express setup took plenty of time to list the dozens of ways my computer will be sending tons of detailed information to Microsoft, so I’ll just change that on my own later.

One other thing most will know is that they deleted the start screen and replaced it with this monstrosity:

I stole that image from Ars Technica because I changed mine in between making mating calls to passing hawks in the hope that they would fly in and claw my eyes out. Bit busy for a screenshot.

I ended up with this, which still sucks:

So, where are all the programs, you ask? Well, unless you like a desktop with 8 billion shortcut icons, you have to search. And do so in a way that intentionally highlights the Windows applications above the ones you actually want to use:

It’s a lot like the Ubuntu Unity interface. Which no one at Microsoft uses. Apparently. Because then they might have searched the Ubuntu forums and seen how much everyone hates it.

The benefit of being a Linux user is that it doesn’t take long for the community to come up with something to fix what we don’t like, an activity that would absolutely cause a lawsuit from MS.

P.S. I loved this comment on that posting:

Never more sadly proven as their intent than by the fact that, instead of ctrl+alt+del, you slide your lock screen now. With a mouse.

Back to the story…

Naturally, my first destination was some sort of settings menu, hoping I could make this better. I got this instead:

Did I accidentally download a child’s toy? The traditional Control Panel was very safe-looking, but it was one click to open up the “I know what I’m doing” list of options.

I understand that tech companies have to build their products to the lowest common denominator. People’s grandmother’s have to use this stuff and they have every right to not be bothered by learning a damn thing about computers yet still be able to use one.

You gotta give us something too. We know this is Windows. We’re not asking you to turn into Red Hat. Just toss us a fucking configuration bone, or we’re taking our business elsewhere, okay?

You might also take a hit from the 25-50′s non-geeks too. They’ve got 17 years of start menu on the brain, and now it takes 5 mouse moves and 4 clicks to shut down their computer – instead of 2 and 2. They might get used to it, but they will not be pleased.

I will say one nice thing about Windows 8. The task manager is a serious improvement:

Sleek. Color-coded process list with details on current usage. Can alter my startup menu (really took that long to put it in the logical place?). Services is no longer a separate interface.

Oh, and what’s this? App history? Sweet.

Oh. Just their apps.

Bastards.

I’m done with that OS. I’ll take 7 until they fix this mess. And if they don’t, I’m out for good.

Last night, I was quite eagerly catching the beginning of Season 2, Part 2 of The Walking Dead when I suddenly paused the show on this shot:

It was then that I realized that this is the Second Golden Age for television…and that what I used to watch as a kid was shit.

Think about it for a minute. Angled to lend perspective from the graves just dug. A wispy branch crossing the screen, almost parallel to the barn behind. The characters subtly arranged according to their group status and affiliation – travelers on the right, farm-dwellers on the left; Rick and Dale at the center; Lori and Carl close by, shadowed by Shane; Daryl shying away, standing perpendicular; Glenn connecting the two groups. The scouting and directing there are impeccable.

That was on the screen for maybe five seconds. Probably took 2 hours of work and thought.

Television wasn’t like this before. When I was young, nearly every show was on a set. There may have been 5 camera positions per program. The writing had the words “good enough” swarming around it like a foul stench. There were funnier people on then, but half of them couldn’t act worth a damn. So-called dramas hit their high point when they showed Dennis Franz’s naked, fat ass.

Okay, they deserve a little more credit than that. But the total is still nothing when you compare the two eras.

Anyone who knows me or has come here via a bad url knows I love Doctor Who. Also brilliantly done. The whole Silence arc should have them in awards for life. Sherlock, Breaking Bad, Dexter, (I don’t like it, but) Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Being Human (UK), Satisfaction, Burn Notice, White Collar, Torchwood (They were never in America. Shut up, you liar.). All well-acted and well-directed with interesting, engaging plots seamlessly integrating inter- and intra-episode action.

And that’s just what a guy without cable watches.

I do credit against the fact that there is a ton of crap TV still out there. But despite a vast expansion in number of channels and near-universal 24-hour programming, the percentage of really well-done shows is actually increasing. If you think further and consider the audience – though these shows are well-watched and well reviewed, their numbers are nonexistent compared to knuckle-dragger drivel like Jersey Shore and American Idol – the magnitude of that simply fact explodes in scope.

Most importantly, it’s about the people. The first Golden Age was such because they took the very best from radio and concentrated enormous amounts of talent into a tiny number of shows.

This one is all about putting the perfect people together and throwing out the old formulas that saddled us with The Cosby Show.* People like Matt Smith had done very little of note before taking over one of the biggest roles filmed entertainment has ever known. But he fit. And he’s damn good. And so are the people around him.

The talent is being re-concentrated. With all the mediocrity swirling around the industry for the last five decades, I’d say it’s about time.

I absolutely loved this post on journalism.co.uk about how numbers are supposed to be reported.

The only thing that I thought was missing was a clear explanation of why people do the things they do when they misrepresent numbers in reporting.

There was a very choice phrase in that story: “give the impression”

I would phrase it more aptly as “re-convey the expectation.” And I’ll tell you why.

Everyone in IT, programming, web design, etc. complains about their users. The fact that they don’t know as much as we do and don’t perceive “computer” things in the same way almost inevitably results in frustration. But we all know that it’s not even their fault. It’s simply not their job and there’s no earthly reason they should (ignoring that almost all of us also have the perception that everyone should know these things, for whatever reason).

I say that to qualify that I’m not calling my users dumb. Pick any given office and I’ve probably got a much better deal than their IT guy.

That said…

It’s not infrequent that one of my users won’t get email or have their mail archiver update for a period of time and come to me with the problem. Most of the time it’s that one of them is simply in offline mode. They simply don’t notice the red “x”.

That is a great example of expectation. Within their email client, they simply expect things to work correctly and, even though there is what I would perceive as a glaringly obvious notification of the problem, they don’t even see it. And I fix it. And we have a quick laugh. And we get back to what we were doing.

Numbers have that same effect on almost everyone. Our relationship with numbers is one that creates the expectation that they’re never wrong and always tell the whole truth. Numbers give comfort or concern in every situation from the odds for our favorite sports team to our odds of surviving a diagnosed illness.

But there is a big difference between my users and journalists.

My users are not experts. The ones that have the power to do so hired me, that neither they nor anyone else would have to go through all I did to become an expert (loose usage) and be able to fix the problems that arise on a day-to-day basis.

Journalists are required to be experts. Experts in communicating information. The inability to parse the information to be communicated in simply inexcusable, numbers or not. Equally as inexcusable as me not understanding my system well enough to know my user has a “red ‘x’” problem before I ever walk over to their desk.

Otherwise, you’re not even as good at your job as my users are at not their job.