My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bought this with an old gift card at the Harvard Coop last week. I’ve long enjoyed Neil deGrasse Tyson’s hosting of NOVA scienceNOW (a show I DVR), as well as his various guest appearances on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and I had followed the news coverage of Pluto’s demotion by the IAU in 2006.

This book is a nice overview of Pluto’s discovery and eventual reclassification (as the subtitle indicates), written in Neil’s whimsical style. There are some funny photographs of various astrophysicists, and good coverage of the cultural impact of Pluto’s demotion, such as various editorial cartoons and handwritten letters from elementary schoolchildren. I’m glad the appendices included song lyrics (including one by JoCo!) and the full text of various documents regarding Pluto.

My only complaint about the book is that I would have liked a little more detail, both in the history and the science, but of course it’s intended to be accessible to a general audience, a task at which it succeeds.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I checked this one out from the library at work. It’s a basic collection of science anecdotes, mostly from the Enlightenment period up through WWII. The author is a British marine biologist, so most of the scientists mentioned are British, and the modern-day stories in particular naturally focus on the author’s mostly British contemporaries in the marine sciences.

One fairly clear agenda that the author has is wanting to recognize various scientists who made major “home front” contributions during WWI and especially WWII, often risking their lives to develop all sorts of non-weapon technologies necessary for the war effort, such as bomb disposal and submarine escape hatches. Many of them were Quaker conscientious objectors, and received no medals or official recognition of some of the dangerous experiments they performed on themselves to save lives on the battlefield.

There are a number of gross-out moments, mostly related to the symptoms of various terrible things either self-inflicted or applied to the public due to bad science.

I suspect there are fewer post-war anecdotes thanks largely to the standardization of experimental procedures with regards to informed consent and other protections for test subjects. Overall interesting, but not engrossing (as evidenced by it sitting on my shelf half-read for a few months).

Looking at my recent blog history, you’ll find that it has been rather book-centric. This is largely a function of a quick book review being easier to write than a longer, more personal post; however, it belies how much of my time I actually spend reading books. I sometimes bemoan the fact that I read less than I used to, but I think I can chalk that behavior up to three factors:

• I read a lot more in high school
• I still get to read more than most people
• I now read more content online

The first point is part of growing up, and the second point is part of a larger sociological question that I’m not qualified to address, so I’ll focus on the third point: how and where do I find and read short- and long-form content on the web? The list probably won’t be too surprising (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news sites, etc.), but I’ll go into more detail on what clients I use to keep track of everything. It should not be surprising that my acquisition of an iPad in April of 2010 significantly changed how I interact with text online.

This has been a topic kicking around my head for close to a year, since I spend a lot of time connected, although some of my reading/archiving methods have changed over time. The most recent inspiration to write this up was a discussion I had with my mom back in October about how to save articles that she finds online, the way one might clip an article from a physical newspaper. Another one was this post from Brett Nordquist in May of last year about personal online recommendations, in which we happen to use a lot of the same sources/services.

Below the cut, my rather verbose recommendations on how to quickly filter a wide variety of text content online for eventual reading.

Definitions

Before I dive in, some quick definitions. This is how I organize things. It’s probably also why my posts get so long… but I think it would be useful to make the distinction between a few categories of things, although in some cases there are overlaps, or things that fit multiple categories.

• Channel – A place where I can read content from multiple individual sources – Twitter, Google News, etc.
• Source – An individual content producer – friend, blog team, news site, etc.
• Service – A tool that makes it easier to read and share items from channels and sources – Google Reader, Pinboard, etc.
• Client – An app that makes it easier to interact with one of the above – Twitterrific, Instapaper, etc.
• Device – The hardware on which a client runs – iPad, Mac, etc.

Channels

One of the important features of how I define a channel is that it has a style. That style both encompasses the typical length of content, as well as the general type of content (mostly text, or more image and video) and who it comes from (friends and family, other individuals, or other groups). That matters because when I decide to view a particular channel might be based on what mood I’m in. I also handle channels differently – some I manage more carefully, keeping track of read/unread, and others I don’t mind if I “missed” something. To some extent that behavior varies based on the capabilities of the service/client I use for a given channel, and whether or not the channel is also used for communication, not just content discovery.

You’ll note a lot of Google “products” in this list, probably because they offer the advantages of single sign-on and tend to have relatively minimalist interfaces and unobtrusive advertisements.

Google News

I access this as a site in my browser, and I haven’t customized it much. I’ve removed the Sports and Entertainment sections, and added a custom one for Mali. This is where I go for general news, and some neutral political coverage, but I don’t tend to dig very deep since there’s not much focus, and on most topics that I care about I have better sources via other channels. However the headlines alone are a good way to remain generally aware of what’s going on in the world, and thus might spark discussions on other channels.

Facebook

Facebook for me consists primarily of personal updates from friends and family, so it generally doesn’t generate a lot of content to read, although I have a couple of friends who primarily share links here. A lot of the sharing tends towards images and video more than text. That said, Facebook’s comments architecture, combined with mobile notifications, means it’s often easier to have follow-up discussions on articles. Additionally for many of my friends and family, Facebook is the best way for me to keep on life updates that I might not otherwise hear about.

Twitter

I tweet. A lot. I don’t know where I fall on the distribution, but my general sense is that I’m on the high end. I follow a wide variety of people, some friends or people I’ve met, some who are strangers. Because tweets are short, a lot of the reading is just getting quick thoughts or links, and sometimes it’s not obvious from someone’s brief description whether a link will be interesting. Twitter tends to be where I get more specific technical or geeky content, since I follow mostly technical and geeky people. I also have a close group of friends for whom Twitter is the place we go to trade a lot of sass and humor. It’s worth noting that Twitter was one of the ways my wife and I got to know eachother better when we were first dating.

Google Reader

I use Google Reader as my feed reader, so for me it’s effectively the RSS channel even though it’s a particular service. I subscribe to many feeds, most of which update only rarely, and a few of which might update dozens of times a day but for which I ignore most individual posts. A big part of my morning or evening routine is skimming the unread list and quickly ignoring articles that don’t look interesting to me. I didn’t ever use any of its social features (which at various points were absorbed by Buzz and more recently Google+), so I wasn’t upset by their disappearance. I generally try to keep the unread count at or near zero, but sometimes that involves a bit of cheating using Instapaper, which I’ll get into more below. For the most part I don’t follow links from blog posts, unless I want more context, or unless it’s a blog that tends to be in a link + commentary format.

Guild Forums

This channel is very specific to me, but it’s one of the ways I keep in touch with my World of Warcraft community, even though I don’t play much anymore. I also maintain contacts with guild members via Facebook and instant messaging. This tends to be where I find out about video game news, as well as hearing about a lot of viral internet memes.

Instant Message

This is predominantly random personal conversation on a wide variety of topics, but for longer discussions on politics or other current events it beats the other channels. Those discussions in turn require some linked content for context, which I usually read immediately to continue the conversation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, by “instant message” I really mean Jabber, with my Google Talk account.

Email

Not a whole lot comes this way anymore, but my mom will occasionally send me news articles. There was a time where most of my internet memes came by way of the various SWIL alumni mailing lists, but the activity on those  has fallen off a lot in the Facebook era.

I think that’s most of them. There are exceptions, but for the most part I use each of these in one form or another most days.

Sources

I’m obviously not going to enumerate and describe every Twitter user I follow, every blog I read, or every website I visit, but I wanted to highlight a couple of high-quality, high-volume sources that probably influence me more than others. I’ve grouped them somewhat by topic, and then in some cases again by related groups of people.

Science & Technology

This is my primary interest in news, so the vast majority of non-friend Twitter feeds I follow are in this area, as well as a lot of the blogs I skim or read. Even when the topic is some tech I don’t actively work with, I like staying up to date on what’s out there. I’ll break this up into subtopics a bit, since this covers so much.

Apple

I follow the feeds of the major rumors sites, such as AppleInsider and MacRumors. Even though their accuracy is low, it’s fun to speculate. I mostly focus though on Daring Fireball by John Gruber and the blog of Marco Arment, founder of Instapaper. You could call them the 5by5 guys, since along with John Siracusa they’re members of the same podcast network that I listen to regularly. They all discuss more general tech issues, although the focus is mostly Apple. My introduction to them was probably originally through Siracusa’s infamously epic OS X reviews.

Tech

Probably the most prolific source is the relatively new site The Verge, to which I was introduced by the aforementioned Gruber. They cover a lot of stuff I can skip easily (like CES), but with enough interesting articles worked in. Unfortunately their RSS feed isn’t full text, but their site design is clean enough (with citations!) that I don’t mind.

Science

One of the more amusing sources of science news are the Twitter accounts for various probes and rovers, such as Spirit and Opportunity, and Curiosity. As far as general news sites, I find that the BBC’s science reporting is superior. In some cases, Wikipedia has near-current information about new discoveries.

Politics

Especially during campaign season, I’m pretty hooked on election coverage, as well as finding out the latest insane bile being spewed in Obama’s direction. My biggest source is Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, which fits my socially liberal/economically moderate leanings well, although he takes some positions I don’t agree with and can be stubborn at times. He has a lot of other content I skip over, but he filters a lot of other political blogs so I don’t have to. The other top one would be 538, whose statistical analysis can’t be beat. (Note: NYT doesn’t allow a full feed, but someone cooked up a Yahoo! Pipes version of 538.)

Another good resource for following up on various political coverage (which I also sometimes get by watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) is PolitiFact, which grades politicians’ statements. These are unsurprisingly often false.

Entertainment

There is a lot of amusing stuff on the intertrons, but as far as longer form reading goes, few can beat the dry humor of McSweeney’s. In a totally different (and eclectic, probably not-safe-for-work direction) there’s the blog of Jamie Zawinski, aka jwz, of early Netscape fame; he naturally has a lot of tech-related snark as well. I read a few web comics still, such as xkcd, Penny Arcade, and Scenes From a Multiverse, but they don’t exactly fit the reading discussion (although they all have associated commentary).

To some extent, I wish I had kept track of when I started following each of these sources, and how or from whom I found out about them. It would be an interesting trend to plot, especially as I get close to source saturation and have to start either ignoring sources or filtering more.

Services

So, how do I read, save, and share all of this content from so many different sources? To some extent this process is deeply integrated with the channels listed above, but there are two standout services that I’ve already alluded to: Instapaper and Pinboard. The former is a way for me to quickly move an article from one of my channels to a medium-term store, which is especially useful when I’m mobile but don’t have time to read; the latter is a way for me to organize links for sharing as well as my own reference.

Instapaper

I’ll talk more about the Instapaper client itself in the next section, but as far as the service is concerned, the primary use for me is that it lets me timeshift my reading. This is especially useful with the client, which can download and store the text of articles for offline reading, which I like to do when I’m on an airplane.

Secondarily, it serves as a low-pass filter on the flow of what I’m reading. That is, by moving articles from Google Reader or Twitter feeds to Instapaper, and then not coming back to them for a few days, I might have a different sense of their relevance to me, and I can decide to simply delete them without reading them.  In recent months I’ve gotten pretty behind in my Instapaper queue, but that just means that I’m more aggressive in ignoring articles that I once thought might be interesting.

Finally, Instapaper is a pretty good track of what I’ve read online in total, since there aren’t a huge number of longer articles that I read that don’t pass through it. I would also add that my positive impression of the service is probably enhanced by the fact that I consume content produced by its creator, Marco Arment.

Unfortunately, Instapaper does not handle multi-page articles very well. Most of the time, if you aren’t able to enable some kind of single page or print view before saving an article to Instapaper, you only get the first page, and there’s no guarantee that when you go back later you’ll be able to access the original article (especially if you’re currently offline). This pageview-enhancing layout choice is increasingly common on news sites, desperate for ad impression cents. Additionally some pages don’t get parsed very well, or are actively trying to thwart services like Instapaper; I’m looking at you, New York Times. The end result then is that Instapaper is really just storing the link, and you have to read the content in its original form.

It would also be nifty if the service could cache PDFs or multimedia content, but I suspect that gets murkier from a copyright perspective, and stops being about “paper”.

Pinboard

A brief bit of history: Pinboard is for me a replacement for Delicious. I had been using Delicious since February of 2008, before it was sold by Yahoo!. I had never really used the “social” aspects of that service, such as subscribing to tags, except to see shared items from a small handful of friends. Fritz convinced me to join Pinboard in December of 2010, while the subscription fee was still quite low (under $3 as I recall). I was initially using it as an archive of my Delicious feed, using the Delicious interface to save and tag links, and having Pinboard store a copy of all of them. My migration to Pinboard happened in May 2011, after Yahoo! announced at the end of April that they were selling Delicious to AVOS. I finally shut down my Delicious account (deleting all bookmarks, which were now duplicated on Pinboard) a few months ago.

Once again, I don’t really use any of the social aspects, except to subscribe to the feeds of a few friends (and share similarly). In some cases I end up seeing links that they’ve shared elsewhere. I understand from the official blog that the creator of Pinboard, while creating a simpler service than Delicious, has gone to great lengths to accommodate the fanfiction community that has fled from there.

So, for me, the main purpose of a bookmarking site is to comment on an archive links for my own future reference. It might be to indicate that I read something interesting; or it might be something that I would want to reshare with someone after an initial posting has faded from memory. It also gives me some flexibility in deciding when and on which channel to share something, since I can pop back to my history to grab some past link (with tags and notes to remind me what’s what). On occasion I go back to a document for my own reference, and the pinned page is easier to find that just googling it.

I also use Pinboard to archive all of my tweets. Unfortunately it can’t go back in time in the Twitter archive to grab tweets from before I used Pinboard, and sometimes there’s a delay, but as far as searching my own tweets goes, it’s vastly superior to Twitter’s interface.

Another reason I like both of these services was their very forthright and honest handling of a major disruption in service they experienced in June 2011 due to an overly broad FBI raid on the hosting provider where they both happened to have servers located.

I should briefly mention that I used to use Readability, contributing a few bucks a month to help support publishers. I really liked the idea of paying a little bit for content online. However, since I never used the text conversion aspect of their service (relying on Instapaper), and I was cutting back on extraneous online expenses, I decided to close my account. In addition I felt that if I was contributing real money for each pageview (as far as I know, a dollar or so is significantly more than most advertisement rates online), I shouldn’t have to deal with the obnoxious stuff most sites do to make money, including multipage articles, ads, and tracking.

If I’m feeling feisty, I’d like to play around with the Instapaper and Pinboard APIs to generate some nice graphs of my usage over time. That would I think make for an interesting follow-up post. I suspect that it tends to be spikier than my actual reading habits, since I don’t always save or pin everything I read, or immediately after I read it.

Clients

A big part of using these services the way I do is dependent on the quality of their interfaces, which is either a web application or a native client. In my experience the native clients are simpler and cleaner, but for full functionality you need to use the service’s website. This distinction is blurred a bit by the availability of APIs that allow various channels and services to expose some of their functionality to other clients, allowing for tighter integration, where you might not need a dedicated client because it’s just a function of another client.

I’ll cover channel clients first, and then service clients (although there’s just the one). For anything mentioned in a previous section that’s not discussed below, you can just assume I use the website, although I will briefly talk about bookmarklets since to some extent that counts as API integration with the browser as a client.

Facebook 

The official Facebook app for iPhone and iPad is pretty notoriously bad. Even after the recent update that improved things like photo viewing, I get all sorts of weird UI rendering errors. I pretty much just use these for viewing push notifications, and occasionally to update my status while I’m mobile. Another annoyance is that you can’t turn off Facebook chat (or hide your buddy list) in the iPad app.

Twitterrific 

My client of choice has changed a lot of the four years or so that I’ve been active on Twitter, and only very rarely do I use the actual Twitter website (especially as it’s changed over the years to grow more and more complex). My favorite by far has been Twitterrific, by The Iconfactory (I think I used one of their free icon packs back in the OS 9 days). The interface is clean, and the use of contextual menus (well, action sheets, but you know what I mean) makes it very easy to read and share.

There are two features they’ve added fairly recently that are useful to me and relevant to this discussion: Instapaper integration (I can send any tweeted link to Instapaper instead of viewing it), and support for Tweet Marker, which makes jumping between my iPhone and iPad much nicer now. They also have improved handling of Twitter’s stupid t.co automatic link shortening, as far as getting back to the original link is concerned.

At home I mostly use my iPad for web surfing, email, Twitter, etc.; the times when I’m at a desktop at home or work, I use the Chrome extension Silver Bird (formerly Chromed Bird). The interface isn’t pretty, but it works, and has desktop notifications. I’ll probably grab Twitterrific from the Mac App Store to replace this at some point, especially if I spend more time on my Mac this semester.

Now a quick review of past clients, and why I moved on from them. When I first started tweeting, I actually used the instant message interface for a while, because I liked the notifications, and I already had IM clients installed everywhere. On my original iPhone, before the App Store existed, I used a web interface called Hahlo that at the time was better optimized for Mobile Safari. My first desktop client of choice was Spaz, also an AIR app. If you view my Twitter stats, you can see that I used TweetDeck a lot, and for a long time, before they were bought by Twitter proper; this was mostly due to their cross-platform nature, and before I realized how terrible Adobe AIR is. I also used the TweetDeck iPhone app for a long while (after moving on from the Twitter mobile site), but it was pretty unstable and had a crappy UI. I never used the official Twitter app (née  Tweetie). My TweetDeck usage also coincided with my most prolific period of tweeting, and my highest involvement with the social media community in Boston.

Reeder 

This iPad app is my preferred method for accessing Google Reader. It’s one of those interfaces that “gets out of the way”, and the integrated (and configurable!) sharing menu makes it much easier to pass RSS feed items from this channel to one of the other channels/services. It’s very easy to quickly skim through posts, either reading them then and there, ignoring them, quickly sending them to Instapaper for later consumption, or tagging them for saving to Pinboard.

The only major downside to reading RSS feeds on the iPad is the totally inconsistent way videos are embedded. I think this is mostly the fault of the original author (or their CMS). Sometimes they play using HTML5 <video> in Reeder; other times the video only works by viewing the original post; and, of course, some videos/players either disable embedding or don’t have a non-Flash version, although that’s decreasingly common. I sometimes get crashes in this app, but it’s mostly either associated with video playback, or when I’m viewing a linked site in a WebKit view; both are presumably due to memory limitations on my iPad 1.

I do use the web interface for Google Reader, if I’m at my desktop. The recent redesign didn’t bother me at all, since I never used any of the sharing features that got replaced by Google+; it took just a little while to get used to. I think if I used a desktop Mac more often, I’d probably consider the full version of Reeder. I pretty rarely have reason to look at the mobile interface on my phone, which is why I didn’t buy the iPhone version of Reeder. (This is one of my biggest complaints to iOS developers – I’d rather pay more for a universal binary I don’t fully use than to have to deal with multiple versions.)

Instapaper 

Suffice it to say I wouldn’t be using Instapaper as a service if it weren’t for the app, whose killer feature is that it can cache your saved articles from Instapaper on your device for reading offline. There’s not much more to say; this is a great, wonderfully designed app, and it works very well. I predominantly use the iPad version; the few times I’ve used the iPhone version has mostly been at the gym. There are a few tasks that are better managed on the website, but not many.

When I am offline, and I want to mark an article as read but I intend to post it on Pinboard later, I move it to a local folder called “Pinboard”, which I then go through, tagging articles. I haven’t played around much with the font options, but you get a lot of control over the presentation of the text. Like Reeder, there are a lot of sharing options built in, so if I’m reading a saved article I might tweet it directly from in the app.

This is not relevant to the client per se, but when I’m reading articles that I found via Google News, or were otherwise loaded in my browser, I often use the Instapaper bookmarklet to save extracted text. I don’t use any of the Instapaper “long reading” feeds, but it is to a large extent the client and service through which most of my text consumption flows.

My client usage has shifted over time, and which clients I continue using depends in large part on how well they’re kept up-to-date in terms of compatibility with services and usability on my current set of devices. At this point I think my current choices are going to be stable for a while, given that I’ve got a pretty good setup now for how they all work together.

Readflow

Most of the individual steps in my reading flow have been discussed in the preceding sections. I’ll summarize with this flowchart, which simplifies some of the options, but gives a general idea of how I process text as I read it (or ignore it).

I read sources from channels using services and then share via channels.

Conclusion

Conveniently, this post has at over 4500 words easily reached the length threshold that makes it perfect to use with a service like Instapaper! I didn’t do that intentionally from the outset, but I seem to have quite a few opinions on this perhaps overbroad topic. Hopefully this (or a portion of it) has been helpful in demonstrating one way to process a lot of mostly-text information from the web.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neal Stephenson is my favorite author, so it is probably no surprise that I tore through this book in just a couple of days and gave it five stars. I remain in love with his overly verbose writing style, and his nerdy asides. I’ll echo something Fritz said when we discussed the book briefly, which is that it hearkens back to some of his earlier work, before the heavily researched and almost academic vibe of The Baroque Cycle and Anathem. That is to say, this book is heavier on the action, but even that action is incredibly detailed, all the way down to what you could easily classify as “gun porn”.

I very much enjoyed his portrayal of the MMORPG T’Rain, and the amusing barbs directed at fantasy writing and settings wrapped up in that. I would definitely play a game with that level of obsessive detail, especially the geophysically realistic terrain generation and real passage of time, although I doubt it would turn out to be a WoW killer because it wouldn’t have that broad of an appeal.

The near-future setting felt realistic, especially because he regularly refers to real-world companies and internet services. It’s interesting to me that from a trademark perspective, an author can do that in writing, but present-day movies generally have to make up news networks, search engines, etc. because otherwise they’d have to pay for the rights. It’s jarring when they’re forced to do that, so I’m glad that distraction wasn’t present here.

One of the more amusing examples of Stephenson’s style was his apparent obsession with the word “talus“. I guess he didn’t like “scree” or “loose rock” and really wanted to emphasize the instability of the terrain the various characters were walking on. I think the final chapters mentioned it on about every other page.

As for the characters, I generally wanted to like everyone, even the bad guys. I think a big part of this was that almost all of them were non-stereotypical or outsiders in some way, making them not fit our assumptions for how they should look/sound/act.

If you like Stephenson, you definitely won’t be disappointed; if you’re new to him, this iteration of his work is also considerably more accessible than some of his work in the last 10 years. I think I will still stand by my claim that Snow Crash is the best introduction, but maybe that’s just because that’s the first book of his that I read, and I was hooked. REAMDE stands alone in his various universes, and is a bit less geekily intimidating than his other books.

Steve Jobs: A Biography by Walter Isaacson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think the main feature of this book that I would emphasize is that it is, in fact, a biography about a flawed man, and not so much a history of his technical achievements. As a computer geek and long-time MacAddict, I found that a little disappointing; I didn’t care as much about every anecdote of his emotional instability, I cared about how he did what he did at various companies. There was barely anything on his time at NeXT, and even the major changes at Apple in the last 15 years pretty much got a single chapter each. I was also surprised to find a couple of spelling mistakes, although I suppose since I read an electronic version that could get patched later.

Overall I would echo John Siracusa’s Hypercritical podcast episode in which he reviews the book as having been writing by “the wrong guy”, making the point that Isaacson is someone who was generally incurious about technical matters. I think my rating of this book would be higher if he had delved into that side of Steve more.

That all said, it is probably the best collected summary of what he was like, mostly due to the access Isaacson had. I learned a lot of trivia, and there were a lot of interesting quotes that I marked in iBooks. I knew very little about his early life, or his family life. I just would have liked more of a study of what made his technical and design successes. There were some good stories from, among others, Bill Gates, Jony Ive, and Steve Wozniak.

I think it’s a reasonable first look at The Steve, but I would definitely read other history books first, or generally familiarize yourself with the history of Apple, NeXT, and Pixar. For the latter, the documentary that appears on the WALL-E DVD, The Pixar Story, is excellent.

I think my favorite quote from Steve featured in the book was this one, which is more philosophical than technical: “The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”. As in my initial reaction to his death, I think Steve clearly achieved that.

Avatar is visually stunning. It has precisely all of the elements you would expect from a modern science fiction epic. I give major credit to James Cameron for an original idea, although the plot itself is a pastiche of mostly unoriginal classic memes. My snarky tweet-length review is “a visually stunning remake of Disney’s Pocahontas“. That said, the film is on its way to become one of the top-10 grossing films of the decade, which until now has consisted entirely of remakes/reboots, sequels, and/or book/comic book adaptations (i.e. not a single original idea). (Note that a non-trivial factor in Avatar‘s opening weekend success is the higher ticket prices for 3-D and IMAX showings.)

A word of warning for my typography nerd friends (you know who you are): all of the subtitles are in Papyrus. Hey, at least it’s not Comic Sans, right?

I, like many other commenters, am very interested in the technical aspects of how the film was made, and I do expect that, like the motion control techniques invented for the original Star Wars, we’ll see a significant shift in how movies with fantastical elements are filmed. It also seems likely that some of the performance capture technology will be applied to video games, especially those with more immersive plots like single-player RPGs.

Another thing I’d add: the 3-D version isn’t strictly necessary to enjoy the visual experience of the film. While RealD, as a single projector polarized 3-D technology, is certainly better than the old red-blue systems, or the ones that required bulky electronic goggles to alternate flickering in each eye, I don’t think it adds a huge amount.

So, overall, I liked the movie, but I wasn’t blown out of the water, due largely to the tropeful plot. That said, it certainly got me thinking about a wide variety of topics, including racial issues, exobiology, and linguistics. I plan to see it again, probably in IMAX. Detailed thoughts below the cut (with some vaguely spoilerful comparisons to District 9).

Visuals

Simply put: amazing.

Basically, the entire movie is a special effect. The main advantage of this is that there are very few noticeable seams between the live action acting and the computer graphics, since much of the time only one or the other is visible onscreen. Compare to even the advanced effects in the new Star Trek, or the just-released Sherlock Holmes, and you can see the difference between quality special effects that are noticeable and totally immersive effects.

I went to see the movie with @Andrle and the both of us were totally immersed in the movie, which is impressive considering its length. A number of my friends have posted that they were similarly impressed.

One thing that I thought was interesting about the performance capture was that I could recognize Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, and Wes Studi in their Na’vi bodies, but I couldn’t really see Zoë Saldaña in Neytiri. This might be a function of having seen her in only one film, namely, the new Star Trek.

Technology

As I addressed above, I don’t think 3-D is necessary for an enjoyable Avatar experience. Part of the reason is that even the polarization method causes at times jarring depth perception problems, and I think it also encourages the direction and cinematography to overemphasize depth-of-field in making shots. On this point @kylejames and I disagree. I’ll grant that I know approximately jack about cinematography, but my sense is that you end up with non-standard shots, which can sometimes be used for interesting artistic commentary, but in this case I just found a little odd.

I fully expect the performance capture technology to catch on for other epic-style science fiction and fantasy films. Cameron is probably going to make a mint on the patent licensing (I’m assuming he has such things?), because this kind of digital puppetry is more flexible and easier to use than heavy prosthetics, and allows the actor more freedom. We might see this in the video game space as well, where motion capture is used heavily for character moves, but not much for character faces (as far as I know).

As for the in-universe technology, the 3-D holographic displays were particularly impressive, especially given how close we’re getting with current research. I think there tends to be a lot of back-and-forth between science fiction and actual research in this regard. Most of the rest was your standard space-marine fare; helicopter-like gunships, mecha suits, and ridiculously hefty-looking combat rifles with multiple ammunition types, etc. Overall this had a very Vietnam feel (the airships hitting the Home Tree was particularly reminiscent of a similar sequence from Apocalypse Now).

I had one criticism, which is that even given the mentioned value of “unobtanium” (ugh, really? To borrow a phrase from a friend, did someone forget to run find/replace on the script before printing?), I have a hard time believing it’s worth it to ship that much mass (in the form of military hardware) to an alien world. Mass is still really expensive to move (as far as I could tell, they were using sublight propulsion and sleeper ships). I suppose I can give them some credit and believe that more of it than I think was built locally, but that was never explicitly portrayed and seems unlikely given the absence of factory-scale manufacture that could produce the mining equipment and such.

Exobiology

They had a really amazing science advisor, or team of them, because I found the flora and fauna of Pandora to be remarkably consistent, with a few exceptions. I found myself throughout the movie wondering how a standardized biological neural interface would evolve, and be preserved across species.

One of my complaints is that they were fairly consistent about showing most of the megafauna as having four forelimbs and two hind limbs in pairs… with the notable exception of the Na’vi themselves. What happened to theirs? I assume the real reason was a desire to have the characters be more human, and be more easily puppeted by a two-armed human actor, but it was still a glaring hole in an otherwise believable alien biosphere.

I was initially annoyed that the Na’vi didn’t look more arboreal, particularly wondering why they would have evolved bipedalism, given that they still lived in a large tree, but this feeling was assuaged when they later revealed that there were savanna-dwelling Na’vi. If one assumes a parallel evolution on Earth, this makes more sense, and then the humanoids would have later returned to the jungle.

I thought the flying creatures were very cool; I’d say someone did some extensive research into the recent transitional fossil finds of flying dinosaurs and the first birds. However, instead of four wings consisting of all four limbs, these had the wings on the four forelimbs with the rear legs as landing gear.

The planetwide neural network on a world orbiting Alpha Centauri is nothing new – and it was probably done before I was exposed to the concept in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, my favorite turn-based strategy game of all time.

Linguistics

In theory, this is probably the aspect of the film I’m most qualified to speak on, but I’ll let my actual linguist friends @kobutsu and Comma get into this topic a little more. If you want some crazy detail on the Na’vi language, check out this LDC post.

I love constructed languages, and my interest in tlhIngan’ Hol (Klingon) and Quenya (Elvish) as a kid are a non-trivial component of why I took any linguistics coursework at all. I also very much enjoyed recently reading In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent.

Overall, the Na’vi language sounded believable… which I think is its biggest problem. It was designed to sound like what Westerners (particularly American English speakers) think tribal languages sound like. This falls more under the category of cross-cultural perception below.

My biggest linguistic complaint was how much colloquial American English was used. I understand that they need the characters to speak in a language moviegoers can understand, even though the film is set almost 200 years in the future, but there was to me an excessive use of colloquialisms. If there’s anything that the sudden rise of the Internet and mobile communications has taught us, it’s that the pace of language change (sorry prescriptivists) can be viewed right in front of us. On the other hand, it’s often obnoxious when science fiction decides to go overboard on word invention. (Note: I am a total Neal Stephenson fanboy and really enjoyed Anathem.) Given that, I would have expected a little bit more technology-oriented slang than we saw, but on the other hand, most of the background characters were ex-military employees of RDA, so maybe all the military slang fits better than I think.

Plot

Umm… well, the film has one, so there’s that…

I’ll chime in with just about every other internet blag and say that this movie is Pocahontas combined with Fern Gully, right down to living in a tree, communing with nature, and stopping big scary futuristic bulldozers.

As I said in the introduction, I give Cameron credit for penning an original story. Unfortunately that story consists entirely of standard tropes, monomythic plot devices, and unoriginal plot “twists”, all mashed together.

It’s not so much boring-unoriginal as comfort-food-unoriginal. I think it says something that we’re culturally attracted to the same plot elements over and over again. I guess the question then is (and I’m sure people much smarter than me have debated this already) is whether those things seem true because they speak to something innate in the human experience, or that we’re all just acculturated to accept them as such. In this film, this manifested as nothing being terribly surprising, but at the same time, it didn’t really bother me much.

I did have a problem with some of the character development; in particular, it was unclear to me why Michelle Rodriguez’s standard tough-as-nails female-in-a-male-world character had a change of heart. They portrayed that she did, but I didn’t know enough of her background to know why she had a problem with the military plan. I also got the sense that the one lead soldier was supposed to be more of a villainous character… I wonder if some of his development got cut?

Cross-Cultural Issues

For once, as a WASPYSM (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant YUPpie Straight Male), I’m eminently qualified to speak on a cultural topic… because it generally seems that this movie is about white guilt. :oD It’s all about the early exploration and colonization of the Americas Pandora while searching for gold unobtanium and dehumanizing/reeducating/relocating/oppressing any amerindians Na’vi who got in the way of “progress”.

This critical discussion at IO9 covers the topic with more expertise than I could, although I don’t think I agree on all points. At least, in my experience of cultural sensitivity (largely developed during my undergrad time at Swarthmore), the “becoming their leader” thing is not what I find interesting. I would agree that District 9 had a much better (and more real-world relevant) portrayal of alien-human interactions. A great discussion of the racial issues in that film, from back in September, can be found in Swarthmore History Prof. Tim Burke’s blog.

One thing that’s mostly absent from Avatar, and the linked discussion, that was a key component of the relevant history is the religious conversion aspect, that a non-trivial amount of cultural suppression was justified through the claim of saving souls. While aspects of the Na’vi religion were portrayed, they also got heavily scienced, in that their perception of god (well, the earthmother deity Eywa) is in fact a manifestation of a physically measurable planetwide neural network. When their “soul” departs the body, some aspect of the individual is stored in that network (making the destruction wreaked on the sacred groves all the more devastating, because the sacredness is real).

I can see why this topic has parts of the right-wing blagosphere up in arms. The movie does not pull any punches in its statement of white guilt, its statements on the environment and resource management with regards to industry, or its statements on private military corporations and the military-industrial complex. I think Cameron tried a bit hard to update the politics; there were a few blatant Bushisms that I found pulled me out of the movie (I heard “shock and awe” used once, and there were others that I now do not recall).

Conclusion

Overall, the film got me thinking, which for me is a sign of well-executed entertainment. We definitely need to figure out our own racial history as a species before we encounter other intelligences (or more intriguingly, create our own artificial ones).

It was visually impressive and enjoyable, and I will certainly see it again. I would recommend the movie highly, in spite of my complaints above.

What did you think?

Unfortunately, my work looked like it had crapped out yesterday when it prompted me to charge the batteries. I’m outside of the Amazon return period, but still under Logitech’s 5-year pointing devices warranty. As it turned out, I just needed to remove and insert the batteries like 10 times to get it to power on. Really, I think this could all be avoided by having a corded version of this product; I really don’t need the cordless features, but this is the only trackball that came close to having the features I wanted. If it were Bluetooth, I might not complain as much (since a separate transmitter wouldn’t be needed).

The secondary problem, as you can see in the video and picture below the cut, is that my mutant power is apparently acidic sweat. The outer coating of the plastic under where my palm, thumb, and index finger generally rest is bubbling and eventually peeling away.

Long story short, I love the design, but am very frustrated with the execution. I’ve asked Logitech in several places to develop a straight USB version of this device.

My mutant acidic sweat is melting the outer coating of my trackball.

Sam Rockwell is pretty much the only actor you see for the entire 100 minute run time, but Kevin Spacey lends his voice to the robot HAL GERTY, and its at times mysterious motives. There are some amusing moments thrown in, as well (being alone in space unsurprisingly makes you… interesting).

If you can, avoid watching the trailer. I think it’s better going into this film knowing as little as possible about it. Unsurprisingly, I found myself thinking of 2001 a lot, in particular the color palettes involved (lots of whites and greys). However, unlike 2001 or more recently a lot of the effect shots in Battlestar Galactica, sound was allowed for scenes on the lunar surface.

Definitely worth the price of admission (if you can find it, probably at your local arthouse theater, as it is in limited distribution).

Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek There is no subtext Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek Star Trek!!!

Something resembling a coherent review, and with the Trekkie fanboy slightly restrained, will come tomorrow. For now, sleep.

As you may have gathered, I have a… healthy… relationship with everyone’s favorite MMO, World of Warcraft. I forget who originally planted the idea in my head (there’s a good chance it was Lilboo, formerly of the Daring Blades on Kirin Tor), but I decided that I wanted a dedicated game controller that was more than just the keyboard; there’s just too much going on in WoW for an FPS-like control layout, in my opinion. I settled on a Nostromo, and after a few weeks of adjusting, and very few changes to my bindings, I have gotten very used to what may be a very unusual control style.

Verbose explanation of how I use the device below the cut.

Nostromo

First, the product itself. I have the Nostromo n52, which gives you a D-pad, 14 programmable keys, a scrollwheel, and two thumb buttons. I’ve only seriously tried configuring it for World of Warcraft (and also for Lord of the Rings Online, but I intentionally set that up to be almost identical to WoW).

Last year Belkin released the Nostromo n52te (Flash website), which as far as I can tell is the same product, costs twice as much, and has silly blue lights. Maybe they improved the “touch” of the keys, but the vanilla n52 works fine after hundreds of days of playtime (although the key labels have all worn off).

The Nostromo works with both PC and Mac, and the Mac software is one of the better ones for third-party peripherals; it’s implemented as a System Preferences pane, which is the “right” way of doing this sort of thing on a Mac (as opposed to a standalone application). Here’s what configuring it looks like on a Mac:

Configuring the Nostromo n52 on Mac OS X

Pretty straight-forward; you select the key on the Nostromo you want to configure, and then you can select a wide variety of actions (and add modifiers). I haven’t ever used any of the “turbo” functionality, I treat them all as normal keys, with the exception of the Shift buttons.

Here’s how configuring the Nostromo looks on Windows (and how it looked on the Mac before they wrote new drivers, as opposed to just porting the Windows ones):

Configuring the Nostromo n52 on Windows 7

The same functionality, but the “cool looking” but non-standard UI I find a bit confusing. Both the Mac and Windows versions support some of the other Nostromo series products. The Windows version is a bit better at saving profiles for export; as far as I know, the current Mac version can’t do this (unless you want to dig around in OS X plist files).

Shifting is one of the really cool capabilities of the Nostromo: while there are only a few physical buttons, if you assign 3 of them to Red Shift, Blue Shift, and Green Shift, you effectively quadruple your available buttons (I definitely don’t use that many), as long as you’re willing to press multiple keys at once. This is usually called “chording”, and at this point it’s very well embedded in my muscle memory, as you’ll see below. This is what really gives you “speed at your fingertips” or whatever they put in the marketing literature – with only a few movements of your left hand, you basically get as many keybindings as a standard keyboard.

n52 Keybindings

As you can see below, I use the D-pad for strafe-based movement, since I use mouse turning. The orange button near the D-pad is hard to use with the D-pad, so I just use it as an auto-run toggle. The six buttons in the upper right are associated with the active action bar; either 1-6 or 7-12, depending on whether or not I’m red shifted. The mousewheel is used for applying target markers (skull, X, etc.). Most of the keys on the left periphery are lower priority things, since they’re hit by my pinky or by an extension of one of my other fingers.

The main functionality is with that block of 6 keys. Between the red shift on my thumb (button 15, below the D-pad), and shift (the literal keyboard key) on Button 11, in the lower left for my pinky, I can select any of my character’s actions with a three-fingered cord. Since I organize my action buttons in-game carefully (see the next section), most of my fast in-combat actions can be achieved by mashing one key with the relevant finger, possibly while pressing my thumb. I can press my thumb on the red shift key while using the D-pad to move, although in highly mobile fights I’m likely to use a combination of autorun and mouse movement.

Also, these bindings should be perfectly valid for a newer Nostromo n52te.

The other keybindings are pretty boring: they open the character pane, my current favorite map mod, or my bag management mod. Green shift and Blue Shift are largely unused, although they focus on modifying the core 6 buttons; Green lets me target party members (function keys), including myself (I mostly rely on Grid and mouseover macros these days); Blue lets me activate pet/vehicle abilities (control + number keys).

Blue shift also modifies some other actions, such as making the D-pad turn instead of strafe, or making my flying mount go down instead of up (note that x and space are assigned to the same button, just shifted). There’s a lot of room for expansion, and the configuration is admittedly a bit haphazard… but I’ve been using it for over 2 years, so I’m very used to it. It’s all in muscle memory, and I can react very quickly to most in-game events without moving my hands at all (I use a Logitech Cordless TrackMan® Optical in my right hand).

WoW Keybindings

If it wasn’t obvious to most WoW players based on the bindings listed above, I keep the in-game keybindings set almost exclusively to the defaults (with the exception of a few additions, or tweaks to use particular mods in place of some default UI components). I also use only the default action bar; the shift-# bindings above select one of the six default action bar “pages”, and then 1 through = on the number row activate an action on the current bar. Thus my Nostromo configuration depends heavily on my bar configuration, since I memorize it

Without going into detail at the level of specific class abilities, here’s how I break down the six action bars:

1. Primary abilities: attacks, anything with a short cooldown; in the case of my healers, geared towards soloing.
2. Panic buttons: potions, trinkets, class abilities like Evasion and Desperate Prayer
3. Secondary abilities: longer cooldown combat abilities; in the case of my healers, mouseover macros for their various group healing and cleansing spells
4. Crafting: maybe silly to have a whole bar dedicated, but I don’t otherwise need the space
5. Transportation: mounts, pets, and usable quest items
6. Buffs: poison hotkeys on my rogue, blessings on my Paladin, etc.

I’m admittedly not 100% consistent in this, but that’s the general idea. Because of where 1 and 2 are bound on the Nostromo, the most important bars are under my pointer finger; similarly, within each bar (and related to the core 6 keys above when combined with Red Shift), the most important abilities are in slots 1, 2, 7, and 8, because these are again under my pointer finger.

Maybe a full description of my UI configuration, including button bar breakdowns by class, can come in a future post; the main takeaway from all of this is that I try very hard to keep things similar across characters, so my muscle memory doesn’t have to relearn much as I switch between the different roles on my various alts. Feel free to suggest any tweaks to this!