What follows is a recording of that session, edited for time. (Sorry for the rough audio in places. I did what I could, but needed to grab the audio straight from our video conference.)

*Sasha would like it to be known that she had to print out that sign in Comic Sans to make sure she got the bad kerning just wrong. She describes this, with glee, as one of the worst experiences of her life.

Many thanks to the players, Sasha, Eric, and Colin (in addition to myself, Michael), as well as a couple of audience members who make brief cameos. It was a blast. You may hear us use various alternate names for each other over the course of the recording. What can I say, we’re a bunch of nerds who’ve played various games together online for years going by various silly names, and habits die hard.

Many thanks as well to the makers of Fiasco. As you can tell from this session, Fiasco is an amazingly good time and easy to pick up with little to no prep. We used the new Roll20 module available for purchase here. Roll20, by the way, is a great resource for creating a flexible shared tabletop to play all sorts of games, spanning the spectrum from old-school tabletop RPGs like D&D, all the way through to party games like, well, Fiasco, even if the people you want to play with live scattered across the world. Or if you are living through a pandemic.

Listen to the Rapture of Beef Wellington in your podcast app of choice by pointing it to this single use feed:

https://stalebreadlunch.net/granary/2021/rapture-of-b-w/the-rapture-of-beef-wellington.rss

If you would prefer a direct link to the audio file, download it here.

Intro and outro music credit:
“I Knew a Guy” by Kevin MacLeod.
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3895-i-knew-a-guy.
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license.

A few others got there first. The Verge has a writeup going into how different frequencies affect our perception of the audio and how susceptibility to prompting can also affect what you perceive. But I’m usually very susceptible to prompting, and I stood there repeating “Laurel, Laurel, Laurel” to myself over and over, but I couldn’t make it happen. It was so clearly “Yanny.”

I tried different devices, different headphones, and speakers, but I couldn’t make my brain hear anything else. Eventually I stumbled upon some pitch shifted versions. This didn’t do it for me at first, but on the very highest pitched one I started to see how someone could hear “Laurel.” There was something like an undertone there, some garbling in the background that hinted at “Laurel.” For her part, Sasha was finally able to hear “Yanny” by listening to the lowest pitched file.

So I did the only thing I could. I recorded the audio and went into Audition to apply some filters to see if I could figure out what was happening.

The end result was this:

In that audio clip, I explain how I modified the file. First I applied a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) filter to cut off all audio above 2 kHz. This, finally, made it say “Laurel.” Clear as day. Then something strange happened. When I went back to the original, I found, “Laurel, Laurel, Laurel.” Uh oh. Now I’m in an odd middle ground. I can sometimes hear one. Sometimes the other. It seems to matter what I prime myself for by hearing the pitch shifted or filtered versions first. But I still haven’t entirely wrapped my mind around it.

I went on to try various other filters and shifts. Listen to the audio for the full experience.

There’s a train of thought that goes something like this: “Democrats will never win unless they start fighting for things people care about.” On its face, this is simple tautology. Of course they won’t. But it really goes to show just how throughly movement conservatism has won the rhetoric war. It swallows whole the line that the Democrats don’t stand for anything.

I’m not trying to claim the Democratic party fits perfectly to my ideal politics. Of course they don’t. But first of all, the idea that Democrats always lose because they don’t stand for things people care about means vastly different things to the different people arguing it. And they all take for granted how clearly right their side is. For some it means Democrats need to “get over” their hangup about reproductive rights (no) and refocus from attempts to build a social safety net into policies that will help middle class people get and retain well paying jobs (because no one, not even those who would benefit, wants to receive direct aid, rather than a job they “earned”). To others it is just as obvious that it means a forthright, hard line protection of women’s reproductive rights, policing reforms, and broad new social programs like free tuition, single payer health care, student loan forgiveness, reparations, and universal basic income.

Everyone on both sides of this debate is certain that they are the vast majority of the left half of American politics, if not an outright majority, period. But Democrats are a coalition party. It is unlikely that they will be able to win majorities without pulling at least a little from all sides. That doesn’t mean you abandon your positions or that certain ideas don’t balloon in importance while others will remain flatly unacceptable. (I think the aftermath of the Obamacare fight is making single payer of some sort a broadly recognized must even among those in the coalition who might not have favored it a few years ago, and while I think the party needs to be accepting of fringe figures with conservative abortion views who will nonetheless vote with the party on supreme court nominees who will protect abortion rights, making some calculated compromise on reproductive rights is a complete no go.)

And yet it remains that the party that defends women’s access to abortion, pushes for universal healthcare, regulates banks (imperfectly and not enough, sure, but does it), issues relaxed sentencing guidelines on drug offenses, etc etc, doesn’t stand for anything and doesn’t deserve the votes of the left because they’re out of touch and don’t care about the issues people care about because I can find examples of things they didn’t go far enough or that I disagree with.

Never is there any self reflection that the narrative itself, that Democrats don’t really have their backs or advance policies that are good for the left, is what leads to people on the left—people who need to push all the harder due to gerrymandering, the electoral college, and packing in cities—to offer at best soft support on election day. Especially during off years when the fear of a supreme court nominee isn’t in play to make people hold their noses.

The fact that this meme is so embedded in consciousness that everything Obama did rounds to zero, that young, politically active people just know that Democrats don’t stand for progressive causes due to the very fact that they’re an opposition party and with complete disregard to the stark differences between what happened during the brief unified Democratic government versus what has happened under unified Republican government, is killing us. And you’re helping.

The disillusioned left doesn’t turn out, the Democrats lose their power in government, Democrats’ priorities don’t get done, and then the failure of action on progressive priorities leads to more disillusion. What have the Democrats really done for us lately? If they really cared, they’d win. And on the side of the Democratic politicians, they look out and see a fickle group that can’t be relied on to turn out and they look more and more elsewhere to secure their votes.

Meanwhile there is always someone further to the left who more perfectly embodies the spirit the left wing of the party’s voters would prefer. This is a good thing. There should always be pressure from the left. But the response isn’t “keep up the pressure” or “these ideas are gaining unexpected popularity, let’s cheer politicians toward the center who start picking them up.” (Isn’t that what we want?) Instead, the fact that the figure to the left isn’t immediately acknowledged by the leaders of the party as the clear arbiter of what the party should stand for, leads constituents on the left to reliably complain that the party is out of touch. Or that the leaders are just faking it because they only started talking about those lefty ideas after they became popular. And remember, there will always be someone to the left. This wouldn’t go away if Sanders had won. It would only shift as we all became disillusioned with his inability to follow through on all his promises and we all became surprised by how not progressive he was on whatever issue he decided to compromise on.

So we’re left with an eternal lack of enthusiasm that rides right up to “eh, they’re all the same.” There is an enormous gulf between being uncritical of the flawed motley Democratic party and living in a perpetual state of disillusionment that prevents ever really buying in to the political process and turning out Every. Single. Time. for every imperfect, but better, option. And this includes recognizing when Democrats you don’t wholly love do good and important things, or when they are out of power, acknowledging that yes they have talked at length about what they would like to do if they could.

I cannot believe that the American left (with whom I largely identify) can look out at the current situation and come away with the idea that Democrats don’t deserve our votes because they aren’t excitingly ideologically pure enough. Republicans who were dumb enough to think that Trump really had their backs and really was going to make a “beautiful” health care system where everyone got better coverage, I can understand. I’m never going to see eye to eye with them and their sin was believing someone who told them what they wanted to hear (also, racism and sexism). But the left needs to come to terms with the fact that buying into the idea that the Democratic party has no ideas and won’t really help advance progressive causes is what gets us here, every time. That getting mad at Democrats for using politics (the unprincipled nerve!) and then getting mad at Democrats for losing (weak pushovers!) and then immediately not caring as soon as there is any victory (because that’s just the way it should have been from the start, what do you want a cookie?) creates the atmosphere where this happens.

Want things to move to the left? Come out in force and vote for the people to the left of the other people running. Want those people to move to the left? Vote in off year elections and primaries. Show them what you care about. You aren’t going to get your glorious revolution. That would feel great, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s a long slog of doing a bit better and a bit better than that. Obamacare is stupid and imperfect and vulnerable, but single payer is much more likely as a goal in a world after it than before. Keep the pressure on and ratchet. And for fuck sake, don’t throw up your hands and say, well, I guess we get Trump because I just can’t recommend people get worked up about voting for a politician (ew) who can be criticized from the left (serves them right).

This has created odd and uneasy alliances, and I welcome them. Ideological purity is a great way for a movement to eat itself. I heap criticism on the craven Republicans who have gotten into bed with Trump, convinced that he is their ticket to achieving their big issue (usually lowering taxes on the wealthy and destroying what vestiges of a social safety net we have in this country, but we can throw abortion bans in for good measure, too). I should equally praise those who might also want those things but believe that Trump is too high a price.

But here’s the thing: It isn’t illegitimate for me to oppose those things. Of course Republican anti-Trump allies aren’t expected to drop their other political preferences. But Democrats are supposed to roll over and only fight back when Trump is incompetent or obviously corrupt, like we should all be able to agree that the one true policy preference is whatever Jeb Bush would have done.

Let me be clear. Trump isn’t the only problem. He isn’t even an isolated problem. If Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio had won the Republican primary and gone on to lose the popular vote by almost three million, but squeak by into an electoral college win, all my problems wouldn’t disappear. I’m horrified by Trump’s incompetence and his white nationalist agenda. But he didn’t come out of nowhere. I’m furious that Senator McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat (and no, there’s no nicer way to put it). I’m furious that a president who bent over backwards to meet Republicans half way only led to the vilification of a centrist Republican health care plan as tyrannical. And none of this magically goes away with Trump.

Of course complaints about Democratic opposition don’t stop these same people from criticizing the Democratic leadership for being weak. No, there’s no leadership, they say. It’s a broken party. Why can’t someone stand up and lead an opposition? The only people doing anything to oppose Trump are conservative iconoclasts! Make statements? They’re only empty words. Vote against a measure? Empty opposition that won’t make a difference. Speak out? You’re frothing at the mouth. It’s like everything he does is bad. I’m losing patience. Join a protest? See this is just as bad as Trump, we can’t hand things off to a popular uprising. Use parliamentary maneuvers to obstruct and draw things out? You’re breaking more norms! This is why Trump is bad, and you’re making it worse!

Meanwhile if you’re a moderate Republican lawmaker all you have to do is a subtle wag of your finger and a light statement, and you’re suddenly (or rather again) independent Saint McCain. (Never mind about Palin, waffling on torture during the Bush years, declaring an intention to prevent Clinton from filling the empty Supreme Court seat for her full term if she won, none of which are, apparently as damaging to US norms as it would be for a Democratic senator to deny unanimous consent.)

The bottom line is that no one wants Democrats to be effective. Left wing purists see parties as, at best, a necessary evil because they involve building coalitions with people with whom you don’t 100% align, and Democrats are the worst of the bunch for being such a big tent. Republicans don’t like Democrats because they’re Republicans. It’s just so easy to believe the narrative that Democrats are screwing everything up.¹ And it’s equally easy to believe moderate Republicans are the salvation. For the left, the bar is so much lower because when they speak up, it’s a pleasant surprise and a sign of hope. For the anti-Trump right, it’s just so much more comfortable. So the goal posts shift where they need to go. And yes, this has something to do with many of those same anti-Trump people dragging their feet on voting for Clinton or deciding to make a “principled” vote for Gary Johnson.

At the end of the day, for a presidential race, one person is going to get the job. Just one. The chance that the person who gets the job is going to line up perfectly with your preferences is nil. I’ll even go out on a limb and say that the chance that the positions the winner actually pursues match up perfectly with their own preferences is nil. Some of this is about compromise. Some of this is about political reality. But a lot of it is just a numbers game. How likely do you think it is, really, that out of everyone in the country you and your friends hold the perfect set of opinions everyone else can rally around?

So if you can’t quite get excited because this one is horrifying and that one said something you didn’t like, get over yourself. You’re not here to elect a clone. You’re not here for a cult of personality who can sweep you off your feet and make you fall in the kind of love that blinds you to the fact that your crush is actually kind of a dick with a bunch of nasty habits. You’re here to pick a steward for the country. You’re here to have a say in what direction policy moves, not to dictate that policy or chose the perfect one.

Voting for the person who pissed you off with her pandering won’t-anyone-think-of-the-children stance on violent media and who you think has too many ties to a wealthy establishment you rightly distrust isn’t a tragedy or a betrayal. It just isn’t what you’d want in an ideal world. Because that’s not the vote. You aren’t choosing between your ideal proxy and this imperfect representative. You’re choosing between a complex human with admirable and despicable traits and someone who disagrees with nearly everything you stand for. Staying home because you’re insufficiently inspired is literally saying that you don’t care if we end up with someone who thinks we should kill innocent family members of people we think might be terrorists because you don’t like the other option’s tone enough. It’s saying that you don’t care if we end up eliminating all taxes on the wealthiest Americans and eliminating virtually all regulations on Wall Street, because you suspect the other option also has some ties to big money and might not spit quite as much fire against the 1% as you’d prefer. It’s saying you don’t care if Roe v. Wade is overturned or if trans people are made into human punching bags because the other choice didn’t come around on gay marriage quite as quickly as you would have liked. It’s saying that you don’t care if we stick our fingers in our ears and yell “Global warming isn’t happening, burn burn, drill drill” because you think the other choice might be a little slimy.

And if you don’t think that any of these issues are real concerns or enough to make you scared and excited to cast your vote, I don’t know what to tell you. If you think that this isn’t how politics should work, that’s fair enough. If you long for the dreamy-eyed candidate who can sweep you off your feet while silkily convincing everyone who disagrees with you how wrong they are and uniting the country into one big happy love fest where everyone prospers for a century to come, that’s a great dream. Work for all those things. Give money to advocacy groups you agree with. Vote in the primaries. Vote in your local elections. Encourage people to run who have no hope of winning but will bring voice to issues you care about and ensure the main stream candidates can’t take you for granted. These all help one step at a time. But do not take your ball and go home. Don’t let yourself think that striving for that perfection is more important than a livable end result. Do not let perfect be the enemy of good. Do not think that disillusionment with your inability to find that one perfect politician means there is nothing worth fighting for and voting doesn’t matter.

Cast your vote for the direction you want the country to move in, even if it isn’t the end point you want. Even if it is one step back, two steps forward. That’s how our democracy works. The people who disagree with you sure as hell aren’t going to stay home. So I’m sorry you’re not as excited as you’d like to be. I’m sorry you’re disgruntled about the options you have. And yes, your complaints are valid. But we’re not here to be excited. We’re here to elect the people who are going to make real, tough, boring, complicated, and imperfect choices. That isn’t exciting. That’s vital. That’s breathing air. That’s drinking water. It’s work. It’s your job. Do it.

In the most recent incarnation, sections of the internet are upset over the review scores given to Mad Max. Why this is the game people are focusing on is lost on me. I’m not sure why anyone should be surprised that a licensed game coming on the heals of a hit movie should receive mediocre reviews, but apparently some people are upset that Polygon’s Phil Kollar gave it a 5/10.

The crux of this Forbes article by Paul Tassi is that while 5/10 might sound like half-way between the worst possible score and the best, the real scale goes from 50% (F) to 100% (A). Basically Tassi is arguing that Polygon is that one annoying teacher who rails about grade inflation, insisting that C is average no matter how many smart students there were in AP Chem this year, and no I don’t care how you’re going to explain that on your college applications.

The problem with this is that it gets grading completely wrong. Grades expressed as a percentage are not directly comparable to letter grades, and you can’t force a direct translation between the two unless a conversion is explicitly given. They mean totally different things. And yet, I remember having this exact same argument about grades when I was in school.

When you get 80% on a test, that means something specific, namely that out of 100 (or however many) questions, the grader scored you as correct on 80 of them and incorrect on 20. That 80% of the questions answered correctly often translates to a B grade is the case only because that is a traditional target used by many teachers over the years when designing tests. But not all tests are equal. What if you wrote a 10 question test with two questions designed so that you doubt anyone in the class could answer them. You might rarely get a right answer on them, but when you do, it would be informative, wouldn’t it? If you don’t expect anyone in a given year to be able to answer those two questions, is it fair to cap your expected grade at a B with As distributed only the rare occasion of a stand out student? No. In this case you adjust the scale to your expectations with 80% becoming an A.¹

Another test might ask questions where getting any one wrong would say something seriously troubling about your readiness to move on. Think of a driving test or some other certification. Sure you did 8 of the basic maneuvers right, but you blew through that red light and crunched the fender of the car in front when parking. That doesn’t sound like a B.

The trouble is, we used to think we could address game reviews this way. (Well, they got 8/10 possible points on graphics and 9/10 points for “gameplay”, so…) But judging a game is, at best, more like grading a paper. The criteria are so many and varied (and yes, personal) that you can’t spell it all out in terms of questions answered right or wrong out of a total. You just skip right to the letter grade. And that’s what outfits like Polygon do. If you look at how things shake out, it works pretty well. If 0 is an F and 2 is a D, 5 is a C+ or so, which sounds about right for a game where there’s something there, but not enough.

If Metacritic is set up to evaluate game reviews as if they’re ticking off right or wrong answers on an exam and interprets a 5 as getting half wrong, I think I see where the problem is, and it’s not with Polygon’s review scores.

Update: I should note that the perception problem that Tassi is pointing out is real, just as grade inflation countermeasures like my tongue in cheek reference to a teacher giving abnormally low grades can be. But the problem here is with Metacritic. If people have accepted a standard that 50% on Metacritic might as well be 0%, they need to find a way to apply a curve to translate the scoring systems of different reviewers so that if Polygon’s 1 = F and Metacritic’s 50% = F, Polygon’s 5 doesn’t get interpreted by Metacritic as a 50%.

I don’t really have much to add beyond linking to it, other than to say I was nodding along enthusiastically through their entire discussion of the complicated importance of genre. They didn’t simply dismiss it, though the conversation started from the proposition that artificial barriers between what can and cannot be said in a certain sort of novel are silly. I appreciated that they acknowledged how genres can foster communities while still being frustrated by the rigidity that can result. In particular, I think Ishiguro’s observations about genre and class when it comes to literature in particular (as opposed to, say, film) really hit the nail on the head.

Anyway, just go read it.

My hazy confusion is informed by the hour and also by the fact that my own left hand is clutching a now empty glass of Rowan’s Creek Bourbon. “I don’t have a drinking problem” is the sort of thing people say when they have one, so I won’t. Unlike the protagonist I am failing to control, however, alcohol has not ruined any portion of my life. Still, it seems significant that I like to play Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero like this: alone, way past my bedtime, and a little drunk on bourbon.

I finished Act III, the middle and thus far most ambitious act of this so-called magical realist adventure game some months after its release. That it took me so long is largely due to this habit. But while it might be insensitive to drink Kentucky straight bourbon while playing a game centered on the end of a life ruined by it, I stand by my method. Kentucky Route Zero is a smoky sort of game, viewed best from a haze at the end of the night when you’ve just barely enough energy left to go on. It invites you to be distracted. To sit and contemplate the scene before you, even though it has little to do with the path ahead. Or so you think. Because it also invites you to begin believing that it’s all connected, that each random bit of someone else’s story is a fragment of your own.

Games have been struggling to come into their own as a narrative platform for many years. Their inherent interactivity makes them well suited to producing a sense of immersion, but it’s also a trap. Few stories stand up to the prodding of player choice, and it is nearly impossible to pace a story that must wait on the player to progress. So for years, most games that tired to tell a story did so by dividing into two, the game you play, and the movie you watch, via cutscenes.¹ Add to that the relative expense of making a game and the hit-driven business model of most publishers, and you’re lucky to ever transcend a summer action blockbuster.

Recently, however, digital distribution, together with greater accessibility of game-making tools has lead to a flowering of smaller projects created by one to a small handful of people. These don’t need to attract the millions of players most traditional publishers require to justify making a game and so are free to explore more niche subjects. They can make choices likely to be adored by some, hated by others, and met with general indifference by most. Many of these games stake out territory closer to installation or performance art than most people’s concept of a game.² Freed from those constraints, some games are making strides in advancing narrative forms, trying to find new ways of telling stories that are enhanced by, or wouldn’t even be possible outside of, the context of a game.

When you start up Act I, Kentucky Route Zero looks, and to some extent behaves, like a ’90s era point and click adventure game. For those who didn’t spend hours Questing with Kings or Monkeying with Islands, a point and click adventure game presents you with an avatar you can move around within a diorama by clicking on the ground. Adventure games have always been well-suited to narrative. They evolved, after all, from text adventures which share some DNA with choose-your-own adventure books and whose modern branch is often referred to as interactive fiction. And even when point and click adventure games were still a staple of the main stream, they were host to some of the first and, to this day, most successful attempts at humor in games.

The greatest strength of adventure games has always been in creating a sense of a living world. Perhaps because they avoid the uncanny valley, adventure games have a much easier time at this than first person 3D games that allow you to walk through an invented world as if seeing it with your own eyes. Instead, you discover the world by poking and prodding it, seeing how it reacts and where it takes you. The typical adventure game player clicks on everything, tries to open every door and combine every item, just to see how the world will respond, learning about the world like an infant who keeps dropping different objects to see how their parents will react. Classic adventure games had obscure puzzles that encouraged this behavior, but exploration has always been the primary drive for me, with puzzles being less the core of the game than an obstacle to prevent you from rushing past it.

And yet successful and laudable as these games were, until Kentuky Route Zero, I never played a game that I thought of as a form of literature.³ And, let me be clear, games don’t have to be literature to be worthwhile. Games are games and literature is literature, neither is more or less worthwhile for how closely it approaches the other. But what Kentucky Route Zero manages here is to approach storytelling through a set of constraints completely different from those imposed by the form of the traditional novel.

When you start up Kentucky Route Zero for the first time, it isn’t entirely clear what you’re looking at. Not knowing yet what sort of beast this game is, it is easy to see the first act as an extremely simple adventure game. In fact early reactions were tepid, with some complaining that it seemed deliberately obtuse and rather thin. There are no puzzles. Possibly the only choice with lasting impact that you make is to name your dog. On a future play-through, though, you can see the foreshadowing from the very start.

Very nearly the first words the game presents you with are these: “JOSEPH: Damn! Did you hear that wreck? Truck full of bottles — I dunno, beer bottles? Whiskey? Lost a tire or something, and spilled booze and glass all over the interstate!” To say it’s implied that it was you in that wreck would be too direct. That’s not the sort of story being told, where a single twist brings it all together. But the theme sure keeps coming back up. It isn’t so much that you were really in that accident as that the sound of shattered bottles of booze haunts Conway, the main character of the game.

The aesthetics of the game are spare, with flat-shaded, notably non-antialiased polygons forming the world. But that spareness makes the little touches stand out. The text is uniformly presented in the form of a play with descriptions reading as stage directions: “JOSEPH sits between gas pumps in a Queen Anne armchair. His hair is gray and his glasses darkened.” This is reinforced by the flash of title cards that introduce each scene: “ACT I, SCENE I. EQUUS OILS.” And yet for all the hints of a proscribed order to things, the scenes aren’t so regimented. If you leave Equus Oils and return again later, you may get a new scene or, if you never do return, you may not, with future scenes simply taking one number lower. So you are acting out a play, but not a fixed one. Rather, it is a play that forms itself around you as you walk through it.

Much of the choice you have presents itself this way. Dialog options aren’t opportunities for story branching or a matter of choosing different approaches, like deciding to be friendly or angry. They don’t change the story, or even seek to create that illusion. Instead they offer a choice between areas of backstory to fill in. They let you chose what other thing this present moment calls to mind or which character is the one to speak up. In a few memorable cases, they ask you to participate in the creation of a poem from constituent blocks. This conspires to craft the impression that you are drifting, unable quite bring to mind the details of your waking life, but as the events unfold before you, a piece or two comes to mind, and you can’t help but spend a little time following the thread.

Likewise text in the game isn’t simply the presentation of static words, but something more alive. Words relayed from a computer screen flicker with scan lines, and when The Zero is mentioned it pulses and shimmers as though the word itself, even when presented in this world, isn’t quite a part of it. It’s little touches like these that begin filling in the story before any of it is addressed directly. An early heart stop-inducing moment comes when Conway tries to log onto Joseph’s computer. If he gives his own name instead of Joseph, the computer replies with the simple and existentially terrifying, “User Conway is not real.” This, it turns out, is the way the computer has of telling you it doesn’t have a record of something. When you request to play a game, it also responds (perhaps somewhat cheekily), “‘Games’ is not real.”⁴ This phrasing is significant, if not directly revelatory. After all, from the computer’s point of view, if something isn’t in its data banks, it isn’t in the world. And to say something isn’t in the world is another way of saying that it ins’t real.

Like works of magical realism in other forms, much of the power in Kentucky Route Zero comes from these sorts of unremarked coincidences or conventions that seem just a few degrees off. At times more than a few, when the game veers off into outright absurdism. At one point in Act II, you are faced with a multi-story office building that is normal enough given the strangeness that surrounds it. Yet one floor is labeled, simply, “Bears.” And sure enough when you ride the elevator past, you see them, lumbering in an indoor forest, bears. It isn’t so much the bears themselves that are noteworthy as that no one other than the player, not even the main characters themselves, feels this warrants any sort of comment.

Given the dependance on an accumulation of vignettes to paint the larger picture of the story, it isn’t a surprise that the game took a couple of acts to really show its depth. What is, perhaps, somewhat of a surprise is that it has so far avoided being weighed down by them. It would be all too easy for a game like this to become a scattered collection of random events whose novelty wears off when you see one too many and begin to feel that they are strange only for strangeness sake. On the flip side, in their desire to tie everything together and make a point, it would be easy to go too far into moralizing. The events of Act III come closest to this with their direct exploration of alcohol’s grip on the characters, but (and beyond the anecdote I presented at the start, I won’t spoil it) it has managed, so far, to walk that tightrope and remain, simply, poignant.

There are so many open threads left for them to explore, that I’m not sure where to guess Cardboard Computer will take the story in the final two acts. Things presented as early as the first scene (Xanadu gets mentioned in an email on Joseph’s computer long before it becomes a central, if baffling, part of Act III) have come into steadily sharper focus over the course of the acts. They might chose to continue filling in those details, making it clearer how Xanadu and Joseph and The Zero relate to the more mundane characters of the world. But I sort of hope we never really find the answers and instead get bored and wander off in some new direction. Because no concrete answer could match the vague beauty of the questions posed in these first three acts. Whatever path they choose, I can’t wait to continue to wander along that aimless loop of The Zero that never seems to take me where I’m going, but never fails to bring me somewhere that reflects where I’ve been.

You see it in the trouble with being welcoming to women.

You see it in the entitled firestorms that erupt out of disagreements over what we should like or who belongs as a part of the community.

And you see it in the fact that touching on geeky interests seems to be the necessary formula for receiving death threats.

It’s that last one that prompted me to write this time. I saw Jenn Frank retweet this article from Vice. That article and the subsequent discussion, starting here with her summation that, “No, movie critics do not get death threats, but critics of movies based on comic books do,” got me thinking again about why this is. Now, to be fair, I don’t have statistics here. I don’t know if a careful accounting of threats would bear this out, but it sure does feel that way, and those threats sure do come out in the geekier corners of the internet.

There are several things at play here, but before I get into the more subtle bits, I want to say this: death threats are never OK. Yes, sure, I know at some point recently you turned to a friend and said “Ugh, I’m going to kill you” or something like it. And you might be wondering why telling someone you don’t know on the internet that you’d be overjoyed to see them die painfully in a fire because you disagree with something they said is any different. The reason you can get away with that in your personal life is that you know the person you’re talking to. They can see you and hear you (or have seen and heard you enough that they can imagine seeing and hearing you with accuracy) and know the context. The internet makes us feel like we’ve gotten to know many people with quasi-public personas, but you don’t. And they certainly don’t know you. Even if you think you’re just being passionate, it’s never OK to tell someone you wish they were dead. Trust me. They may not take you seriously per se, but they don’t think you’re kidding. And thats before even getting into the truly dark stuff.

But what about the middle ground? The stuff more along the lines of “No, you’re wrong. You suck!” We’ve all felt that reaction when someone criticizes something we love, and if most of us are well adjusted enough not to lash out in the form of death threats, we’ve probably caught ourselves starting to respond to someone in other, more minor, unhealthy ways. Why is this so much more prevalent in geek culture than in the main stream?

The first reason is, simply, that we care. Geek culture is defined around people who care an awful lot about something. A TV nerd isn’t someone who just passively enjoys whatever happens to be on. They’re someone who seeks it out and feels passionate about their likes and dislikes. And if they self-identify as a TV nerd, they’re someone for whom that passion is a part of their identity. Listening to someone attack those likes can feel like an attack on their person. Conversely if you don’t really care that much, if you find TV just to be a good way to pass a little time, you’re not likely to get worked up about it, and you’re also not going to call yourself a TV nerd.

More deeply, geeks in particular have an aversion to being shut up or silenced. This is where all sides of arguments often flounder. When two sides disagree, it’s very easy for both to think that the other side isn’t just disagreeing with them, but is trying to erase their ability to speak their mind. Ironically enough, this generally takes the form of them countering by trying to shut down the other end of the discussion. In a broader sense that’s what this whole discussion is. Critics say something some people don’t like. People say they don’t like it. Critics say people shouldn’t say that. Obviously that’s overly reductive, and, in a sort of Godwin’s law derivative, the first side to reach for personal attacks needs to cool it the most, but both sides would benefit from recognizing that each has the right to their opinions.

I think that at the root, geekdom’s problems here stem from the fact that we’ve all been told, repeatedly, that whatever it is we like is stupid. That it ins’t something grownups should enjoy. That it isn’t real literature. That only a loser would care about that. Geek culture may be going mainstream with summer blockbusters being based on comic books, but it’s a fractal. It’s nerdiness all the way down. There’s always a level deeper that mainstream society doesn’t get. “Movies are frivolous, go read a book.” “I love film, but gosh, grow up and watch a real movie” “Comic book movies are fun, but you actually read comic books?” “Comics are fun, but you’re going to a convention?” “I love cons, but I don’t get all the dress-up. That’s so juvenile.” And so on. No matter how mainstream various parts of geekdom will get, geeks will always be born being told that their interests aren’t normal or valid.

Part of the wonder of the internet, and of growing up in general, is finding the freedom to select groups of peers who share those interests. It’s realizing you’re not alone, and there are people out there who value what you do. To be sure this can lead to groupthink, and it can be a way to hide from challenging opinions, but it’s also wonderful. Nerds as a rule don’t lack for access to opinions that our interests are silly or wrong or unimportant.

But that experience does set up a poison. Being told that our interests and opinions aren’t valid should make nerds particularly empathetic to underdogs everywhere, whether we identify with their points of view or not. And to be sure many segments of geek space do cheer as women break into male dominated fields. They do stand up for trans folk fighting for the right to be themselves, and support queer people’s desires to live openly however they see fit. But it can, and does, go the other way, too. Those communities are hard won and it’s easy to see threats at the gates instead. The sentiment can all too quickly turn to, “But I only just found a place where I can be comfortable being myself, and now you want to change it?”

Likewise nerds, of all people, should love tearing something apart and analyzing it. Especially if it’s something they love. It’s what we do, right? But when someone from a position of perceived authority comes out and says they don’t like something, it’s all too easy to hear that voice telling you to grow up. That your preferences aren’t valid. And that feels like a call to arms, not an opportunity to geek out over why your opinion differs. Even worse, if the dissenting opinion comes from within the community, it can feel like a betrayal. The voice telling you that you’re stupid for liking the things you do is coming from inside the building!

So it’s understandable that vitriol follows passion. That people who see their own existence as a struggle against a dismissive mainstream will lash out at being dismissed. And I don’t think we need to blame the internet or passion or give up our desire to bond with fellow outcasts. But next time you feel perplexed about how anyone could possibly fail to like your own beloved movie or book or game, try to channel that feeling into an examination of how it could be even better. That’s what geeks do best. Lean on it. And you don’t have to come away agreeing with the conclusions, but recognize that thinking about where counter-arguments are coming from is a great opportunity to think more deeply about your most loved topics.

And also, just, like don’t be a dick about it, OK?

Edit to add a depressing postscript: No sooner did I post this than I saw people being horrible to Zelda Williams over her father’s death. I’m not sure this really adds much to the conversation, other than just that people suck, and if you look, you’ll find them being terrible to people with any sort of visibility.

Never Let Me Go is a tragedy of another sort. A more painful sort. But one that is no less inborn. It’s there in the background from the start. In spite of the movie, I managed to come to the book without knowing the premise. (The Library of Congress catalog data did tip the book’s hand, which is what I get for being the sort of person who reads copyright pages, I suppose.) But even without knowing what it was, the sense of it seeped through from the beginning. Like the students, I didn’t know what I knew, but I knew.

It’s the creeping sense of dread that makes the book. This won’t end well. This was never going to end well. And you’ll watch. But if there’s one flaw that leads to the doom of the characters in Never Let Me Go, it’s that they accept their mortality. Like we accept ours. Like us, the greatest ambition of the clones is to put it off for a few years. Maybe if they love enough, they can get three more years. Toward the end, I thought about how I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I’d kill myself. Or kill them. Why go peacefully to have my organs harvested? Why should they deserve to extend their lives when reaching thirty-five is so much to ask? But they don’t. It doesn’t even seem to occur to them.

And I suppose it doesn’t really occur to me, either. I’ll die, someday. And probably without the satisfaction of relieving someone’s suffering by the way. And unlike the normal humans who drift in the background of Never Let Me Go, I’m not about to go violently to my end, taking someone else out in the hope that I might buy myself a few more years. Maybe that’s tragic. Or maybe it would only be tragic to an outsider, someone who hasn’t known since birth that they were going to die sometime before the end of their first hundred years.

But if it were really that simple, it wouldn’t be so human. I do mourn my own death. And the clones of Never Let Me Go may not fight their creators, but they know. They know they were made to suffer and die. And though they may abet their creators in little ways, they know their deaths are a plan that someone made. Maybe it would be something like believing in god but not the afterlife.

The creeping knowledge of what it is comes on slowly and makes me wonder when, exactly, it was that I became aware of the inevitability of my own death. I don’t recall ever not knowing. There was no big childhood moment of loss. One grandparent of each sex from each side died before my own birth, and the remaining two survived to see me reach adulthood. I do remember a moment of dread as a child when I became aware of environmentalism and the implicit threat that the world might not outlive me. I suspect that, like much else, I became aware of the concept of death through osmosis, overhearing conversations between my parents that I was not quite old enough to appreciate, so that death was never a concept absorbed full-force. There was no single moment of transition from ignorance to realization. I processed it, instead, in steps, ranging from blind acknowledgement to the ever more concrete understanding that my body will one day fail.

I wonder, though, if it is even more innate than that would suggest. Perhaps there really is something about being mortal that sows seeds of that realization without need of any explanation. Maybe we learn through observation as infants that people are not infinitely varied in age. Maybe we are smart enough, even then, to observe that few, if any, exist beyond our grandparent’s generation. And we begin to figure it out from there. Or maybe there is something wired into our brains through eons of evolution that sets up the concept. After all, as impossible as death may be to contemplate, infinity is the harder to grasp by far.

If, like me, you go into Never Let Me Go without preconception (excepting my unfortunate encounter with the label “Cloning—Fiction” on the copyright page), your understanding of what it is evolves along with the students. You start with the somewhat ominous words “carer” and “donor” dropped on page one along with the implication that a career ending at thirty-one is, if anything, on the long side. In what follows, death paints an inevitable backdrop, but for a time, it is only distantly relevant. The children have their lives. Their concerns, for the most part, have nothing to do with their fate, and as a reader you forget to be concerned with it. The failure to mention parents does stick out, and along with the lack of any concept of holidays, it obviates any need for confirmation via copyright page spoilers that cloning is involved. But while the combination of “Cloning—Fiction” with “carer” and “donor” is enough to void any doubt, the why is left unsaid. And for a while, you, the reader, get to pretend along with the students that there might be some more innocent source to that pattern. But you know better. And they know better. And you know they know. And so you become implicated along with the guardians at Hailsham, sympathetic, but ultimately, like Miss Lucy, burdened by the knowledge that these happy children whose lives you are enjoying exist only to be slaughtered. And that tension—whether and how much do they understand how unfair that is—coats everything.

If I have one qualm, it is in the way the book allows itself a moment of uncharacteristic release. Kazuo Ishiguro is unable to resist a climax, allowing a voice for the guardians to lay it all out and explain, in stark terms, how there is no hope, not even for three more years. Not even for those in love. We get to have that moment of satisfaction, the chance to explain why. Why Hailsham, why nothing will change, why make an effort to raise students instead of simply breeding clones. As little satisfaction as the answers hold, they break the tension. They let us sympathize with Tommy when he gives a last tantrum. And they give us more than we ever get by way of answers about our own mortality.

I can’t help but think that the book would have been more powerful without that last bit of resolution. If they never knew, for sure, the why of it all. If they decided it would be too painful to learn they couldn’t get a deferral. If they went calmly to their fate, not because they knew all other paths were closed, but because it was the one path they knew. Because following that one path, even through pain and death, was less frightening than contemplating the possibility that their hope was futile or, worse, that all they had to do to be spared was ask.

OK. Look. I don’t read a lot of YA. I like my books plenty messy and ambiguous and surreal. But I do read a fair bit that is classified as science fiction, a genre the type of person who looks down their nose at an entire publishing category probably thinks is for underdeveloped children, too.¹ She certainly dashes off a quick comment that at least those adult YA readers aren’t reading, shudder, detective novels.

I also play games, a medium that has seen a wonderful flowering of very adult narrative possibilities as my generation ages. But I should probably be embarrassed about that, too. After all, I once watched someone play Call of Duty and all it offered was a bunch of high teenagers shouting homophobic things into a mic and shooting each other in the head. And I heard that it’s, like, one of the most popular games, so therefore I don’t see how games could offer anything compelling.²

Oh, and I heard this really bad song on the radio. It’s really popular, apparently, so I guess modern music doesn’t have any artistic merit.

All right, I’ll cut out the sarcasm, but seriously, it’s hard not to react to the article in that tone. And you get the point. Selecting a popular thing you don’t like may make a great straw man, but a solid basis for characterizing whatever category it belongs to, it is not. And insisting that rebuttal must seek to overturn her opinion about the example she chose is cheap rhetoric, too. When you get past the generalities, the core of Graham’s argument is that she didn’t like The Fault in Our Stars and concludes that because it’s popular and it offers an uncritical, simplistic view of adolescence,³ all YA is simple and offers an uncritical view of adolescence. She doesn’t seem to consider that she might just be reading bad YA. Or, more appropriately, YA that she doesn’t like.

In all seriousness, if you find yourself writing an article trying to convince other people that they not only shouldn’t like something they do like, but that they should be ashamed that they like it, you should stop and reconsider what you are doing with your life. By all means encourage people to read adult fiction. Explore why so many adults seem to be turning to YA to find literature that satisfies them. Explore why so many books are being sold as YA. Tell us, hey, if you liked this maybe you should try this other book. It’s similar but ultimately deeper. But if your whole shtick is to try to tell people not to like something that they do like, you have to consider that the problem just might be you and not them.

Like I said, I don’t read much YA, but I don’t agree with the premise that it is, by definition, uncritical of the process of growing up. A classic element of much YA literature is to tell kids that, yes, it is that complicated for other people, too. Adults have a tendency to look at children and say, “Look at them. So simple. Not a care in the world.” But it is a time of extreme turmoil where things change so fast in such fundamental ways, few adults could cope. Stories about teenage years remain popular precisely because of all the uncertainty and anguish that comes from not having yet carved out your own place in the world. Good literature for children recognizes this and capitalizes on it.⁴ There’s also a clarifying aspect to books written for children. Not all books for adults⁵ are needlessly long or over-wordy (and so what if some are, there’s a place in the world for long, heavy prose, too). But books for younger people must often do more with less.

If there’s a problem with our reading culture, as a man, the one I’d focus on is the assumption that adult men don’t read fiction at all. Or worse, the problem that it might be true. When preparing to query a novel, as I am at the moment, you definitely do get the sense that out of ten books being published seven are for young adults, three are for adult women, and maybe somewhere there’s room for an eleventh. Editors and agents aren’t stupid. This isn’t some plot. I’m sure it reflects the reality of what sells and who buys books. But I wonder what happened to make reading, reading whatever, something that men apparently feel they aren’t supposed to do. It can’t possibly help men, or adults of any shape and flavor, to be interested in reading to slap the book they’re enjoying out of their hands and to tell them to be ashamed because people who look like them shouldn’t be reading that.

Basically, the RSS spec gives an opportunity to tag each item in the feed with a GUID which can by any snippet of text (optionally a permalink to the item) that uniquely identifies the post. Most readers that I’ve seen use this value to determine if a post is a new item or not. In other words, the body text can change completely, but if the GUID remains the same, it won’t appear as a new unread item in your reader.

I’ve noticed that in some feeds I subscribe to this causes problems (most particularly in Gruber’s). Sometimes he will publish a new item and then, very soon after initially publishing it, add a paragraph or fix a major problem in the post. My reader, however, will have cached the initial version, so even if I come to my reader long after he made the change, I’m unaware of the new content unless I see it on his site itself.

In an attempt to avoid this issue, I initially generated my GUIDs as the permalink plus the date of the most recent revision of the article. This has the effect of automatically pushing out a new version whenever the CMS sees the article as having been edited. This was a mistake.

Unfortunately, I underestimated the number of times I’d spot a small typo and want to go in and fix it. Suddenly I found myself wondering whether I ought to go in and capitalize something I’d accidentally put in lower case because I knew it would cause a new version of the article to appear in the feed. Sure, I’d like to have people read the fixed version, but if someone already read it, it hardly seems right to bug them with a new unread version in their reader over a change they would struggle to locate.

What I’ve done now is to add a custom field that allows me to append a version string on the end of the GUID. This way I can go in and make small fixes without triggering a new version in the feed, but if I make an update or a major factual correction, I can chose to flag the item to be pushed out fresh. I promise to be conservative with the use of this field.

This behavior still isn’t perfect. I’d love some way to make it so that minor corrections and typo fixes appear for anyone reading the article for the first time, even if the RSS reader cached it before I made the corrections, without making a new version appear as unread in someone’s reader who has already read it. But this seems like the best option given the available technology.

Notch (Markus Persson), the creator of Minecraft, and one of the pillars of the indie gaming community, reacted quickly on twitter by canceling his deal with the VR company, saying, “We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.” He later expanded his reasoning on his own site. The nut is this (emphasis is his own):

Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.

Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?

But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.

Max Temkin, indie game magnate in his own right, and one of the minds behind Cards Against Humanity, most closely matched my own feelings on hearing the news with his post on the subject: “I join a lot of the people on Twitter who feel that this acquisition was somehow kind of sad, which is a curious emotion to feel about a social network buying a hardware startup.” He goes on:

If I had to hazard a guess, here’s what’s sad about it: Oculus was this big, open question in gaming. Just this weekend I was on Giant Bomb with Phil Fish and Zoe Quinn, and we were speculating wildly about the ways that the Rift would allow us to explore new worlds, understand body dysmorphia, and have computer sex. We hoped that Oculus could show us what was next for an art form that we love. And they did, and it sucked: Oculus will be a hobby project owned by an advertising company, used some day to collect personal information from “users” which will be sold to the highest bidder.

(For the curious, the segment he references is recorded here with the VR discussion starting at about 42 minutes in. Fair warning: includes drinking of Buckfast, swearing, discussion of teledildonics, acid, and synesthesia, before descending into a discussion of the downfall of society.)

To be sure, not all reactions were bad. Will Smith of Tested writes that Facebook buying Oculus VR is probably a good thing. In short, he points out that as Oculus had already taken on venture capital funding, this acquisition may shelter them from many threats: “As a VC-funded company, Oculus was walking a tightrope. A major mistake, one botched product release, one VC who wanted a quicker return on his investment, or even one story about VR addiction on the Today show could erase everything Oculus had built.”

With a little time to simmer down on the subject, I’ve wound up somewhere in between. I don’t trust Facebook. I can’t say I even like Facebook. Where Facebook has intersected with games, I’ve actively disliked it. So the addition of Facebook takes a little of the shine off Oculus. But the addition of Oculus might make Facebook a slightly more interesting place.

One thing that has always been interesting about Facebook is that unlike most technology startups of the last couple decades, Oculus included, they seemed determined from the beginning not to become a product to be acquired or folded into a bigger fish. They wanted to become a company. With their recent acquisitions, it’s clear they want to become a conglomerate. Something more like Disney, perhaps, even than like Google. So perhaps it’s as wrong to view this as the merger of Oculus into Facebook the product as it would be to think of Joss Whedon as making films for that animation studio that makes the Mickey Mouse cartoons.

But regardless of the practical considerations, even with the most optimistic lens, it still left me agreeing with Max Temkin from above. It makes me sad. And, yes, it is interesting to wonder why that is my reaction. His is a very good analysis of the specifics of this case, but for me, anyway, I think there’s something more general going on. I get this same kind of feeling to varying degrees whenever I see an indie startup gobbled by something bigger.

In part, I think, it’s because it represents a little death of some fraction of the indie dream. When we get invested in an independent company or artist, it’s easy—at least for those of us with creative ambitions, ourselves—to get swept up in not only the product, but the story. A small group of bright, enthusiastic, talented people bands together and makes something, not as a bullet point on some quarterly investor call, but because they believe in it. And they succeed, doing well enough to keep doing it. Well enough to live well. It’s an aspirational dream. Even if they take on funding, as long as they retain control, the idea of a group like that making the thing can be as exciting as the thing itself.

I had a little of this disappointment when Whiskey Media dissolved in 2012 and Giant Bomb moved to CBS Interactive. It was easy to imagine them in their old basement as this clubhouse of creative, opinionated people making crazy things and talking to people who make crazy things. It seemed like a nice dream to have a group of websites founded on the idea of strong editorial voice, standing against corrosive CPM advertising. It seemed like being bought by a wealthy conglomerate was the admission that the dream was over.

As it turns out (as evidenced by the totally not-approved-by-corporate tenor of the video linked above) they’ve kept their spirit pretty well so far. But it was still a shock to go from seeing videos shot in a brick basement with their own bar to a cube farm in an office tower. I can’t come up with a much better way to describe the feeling of an indie being bought out than that. The trouble is that indie dream is just that. It’s an idea. When I imagine the clubhouse in the basement, I don’t have to work out the financial realities. Or live with the apparently terrible, illness-inducing mold in the air. Staying as they were wasn’t an option, so it isn’t fair to represent the two paths as some sort of choice. What is sad, ultimately, is having to face up to the fact that it couldn’t work. That isn’t to say indies can’t thrive or that all indies who sell to bigger companies would have died otherwise. But the reality is that in many of these cases, the dream of that independent group of people making great new things without corporate overlords was only a dream. And whatever the particular reasons behind that this time, no matter how good they are, that realization sucks. And it’s sad. And it’s worth mourning.

Focusing on numbers seems like a great way to go. Any field gathers its share of Very Serious People who know what they know and know that they’re right because, after all, they’re successful, how could they be wrong? And when they aren’t successful? Well, they were only saying what everyone else knew, too. No one serious disagreed. You can’t be mad at them without being mad at yourself. The media loves talking to these people because it’s easy. It turns out that understanding every bit of knowledge you might need to come across in the course of reporting is hard. Whereby “hard” I mean “impossible.” One easy, and better, safe, way out of this is to punt. Contact a successful, respected person and report what they say. If that position is deemed too controversial, just find another who disagrees and print both. We are rightly hungry for journalism that takes responsibility for vetting its sources and is willing to call bullshit when someone states what everyone thinks they know, but the data disproves.

Unfortunately two people I trust a great deal when it comes to using numbers to draw conclusions about the world, aren’t impressed so far. Sam Wang,¹ like Silver, has successfully tackled the task of predicting election results via aggregated polls over the last few rounds at the Princeton Election Consortium. He points out via Twitter that, “stat-worshippers are also hedgehogs.” This is a reference to Silver’s stated goal for FiverThirtyEight to be a “fox” not a “hedgehog.”²

But numbers aren’t just numbers. Interpretation matters. Knowing which numbers to chose matters. And the way you move from numbers to a conclusion matters. Paul Krugman pointed this out on his blog:

But you can’t be an effective fox just by letting the data speak for itself — because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking. If you think the data are speaking for themselves, what you’re really doing is implicit theorizing, which is a really bad idea (because you can’t test your assumptions if you don’t even know what you’re assuming.)

I sincerely hope they get things turned around. We desperately need data driven, opinionated reporting coming from sources high profile enough to shift the conversation. But we run the risk of being even worse off than we were with bad appeals to authority if we believe that numbers immunize us from other sorts of critical thinking. There’s a reason why statistics and lying are so connected in popular imagination.

Update: Again via Sam Wang, some more specifics on the early missteps of the FiveThirtyEight crew. The Way Things Break covers some of the same ground from above, then dives into their misuse of statistics and flirtation with climate change denial via the hire of Roger Pielke Jr., who apparently has a bad habit of using statistics to argue a predetermined point while getting much of the basics wrong. Paul Raeburn at MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker blog covers how Jeff Leek, writing for FiveThirtyEight, dresses up an exercise in garbage in, garbage out and, by cloaking it in numbers, disguises it as a statistical approach to determining validity of a health news headline.

Zeynep Tufekci addresses her piece on Medium at Nate Silver who recently launched his numbers-oriented news site, FiveThirtyEight.¹ Silver had bristled at the contention that his predominantly white-male outfit was a part of an exclusionary culture, stating, in short, that whatever their racial or gender makeup, they were outsiders. Tufekci goes on to analyze how this psychology works out and can lead to many of the people who (let’s give the benefit of the doubt) unintentionally reinforce cultural barriers to feel that they are above and in fact stand against such exclusion.

What interested me in the wake of writing an article on The City & The City is how the novel can be seen as an allegory of this sort of cultural segregation being taken to an extreme. Being in Beszel or Ul Qoma doesn’t place you on the social strata, though Ul Qoma is presented as ascendant and Beszel in decay. In the book, they are regarded as so separated as to be thought of as different physical locations. But think of the different worlds we do have and how we are consciously and unconsciously sorted into them. We can and do interact across social and class boundaries, but signifiers, whether chosen like clothes or inborn and unalterable like skin tone or something in between like accented speech, influence how much access you will have to them.

A citizen of Beszel capable of being a perfect chameleon has a super power. He might step into a telephone booth in Beszel and emerge in Ul Qoma with a change of clothes. Imagine how much easier it is for this person to get on in Ul Qoma than his countryman who must constantly watch his speech and way of moving to prevent Ul Qomans from unseeing him.

The goal in the real world isn’t assimilation, though. People often act as though the ideal is to be colorblind. But if different cultural backgrounds didn’t matter, it wouldn’t be nearly so big a deal to have diversity in the first place. It’s not that all those cultural signifiers are unimportant trivia elevated above their station. Rather the book drives home how these little arbitrary signs are important.

The goal, struggle sometimes, is to be aware of those signifiers. Both the ones you broadcast and how you react to those you see in others. You aren’t doing anything wrong by embracing your own cultural signifiers,² but you can’t think you’re immune to them, no matter your background or how openminded you are. Noting privilege is not an accusation. It’s when we forget about it that it becomes damning.

Why did I make this website? I cover most of it in my Welcome Letter, but the short answer is that I’ve come to the point where I feel I need one. Something I’ve discovered about myself over the last few years is that whatever else I’m doing, I have a fundamental need to make things. And at a certain point when you make things, you have to share them. It’s a part of the process. You don’t have to get famous or share them widely, but having an audience is a part of what it means to be art or media or whatever you want to term the things people make. In this day and age there’s no need to ask permission. The internet is the place we can all go to put things out there big or small.

You’ll notice I already have a few of those things here. The common way of launching a blog is to start with a “hello, world” post (I suppose that’s what this is. Hello!) and move on from there. But the design I had in mind for this site doesn’t work very well with fewer than about four each articles and breadcrumbs. And example content sure beats lorem ipsum any day. So even though this is the hello, world post for this blog, you’ll find a few posts that go back before it. They’re scattered back through time as thoughts struck me, and there’s certainly something odd about publishing blog posts reacting to events long gone, but there they are.

I’m not sure what this space will become over time, but I’m glad now to have a space. Hello, world.

But as every teenager knows, this makes posturing more than a game of affectation. The little signs by which we signal what category we belong in are our one way to influence how people will interpret what we do. We’d all like to think that we can change our mind about something, but once you’re slotted away there’s usually little you can do. So you declare it loudly without saying a word, and probably without even being aware you are doing it, “This is the sort of person I am!”

It’s the same with books. Genres are just tools we use to explain what to expect out of a book. I don’t mean to be dismissive by saying that. They are powerfully important marketing tools, and marketing, for all the bad connotation the term sometimes gets,¹ is how books get read. But it’s also important to remember that there is no law of the universe that declares a book to be of a certain genre. We can (and probably will) argue about what defines different genres until language ceases to exist, but at the end of the day a book belongs to a genre because people perceive it to be so.

With that definition in mind, The City & The City is clearly science fiction. It won the 2009 BSFA Award, the 2010 Hugo,² and the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award. With that pedigree, I’d wager most people pick up the novel expecting science fiction. But what it dishes out isn’t exactly staple genre. It doesn’t take place in the future or on a different planet or involve much in the way of technology at all, beyond crappy eastern-block government office PCs. It doesn’t have fantasy trappings either. It doesn’t take place in the past, feature mythical creatures or magic. It doesn’t even have the common trappings of magical realism. An apt (if tonally different) comparison is to the television show, Louie. Louie is presented as comedy, but it often verges into absurdism more surreal than comedic. Nothing that happens is, strictly, something that couldn’t happen in the real world. It just wouldn’t.³

Likewise, there’s nothing physically impossible about the premise of The City & The City. In fact it presents itself as a rather run of the mill murder mystery with a dash of political intrigue. The protagonist, Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad reports to the scene of a crime, a young woman murdered and dumped in a slum. His investigation turns up connections to organized crime and anti-government groups. And when he uncovers potential connections to the neighboring city of Ul Qoma, he finds his investigation challenged by the possibility that a higher branch of special police might swoop in to take the case away from him.

Except Ul Qoma isn’t a neighbor, not as we would term it. The two city states coexist in the same physical location. The first real clue that something strange is going on comes as early as page 12⁴ with the conclusion of the first chapter as Borlú takes a final look around the crime scene:

As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrász, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStráz at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStráz, that depressed zone.

“It might be anywhere.” The significance of that statement doesn’t sink in at first, seeming an innocent observation that the view is one you could see anywhere. But there’s nothing innocent or casual about about the act of noticing where things might be seen in Beszel or Ul Qoma. The signifiers by which people and things declare their allegiance to one or the other aren’t a matter of adolescent posing. They’re the borders of life that separate the cities. And if you momentarily fail to observe those boundaries and see something that is elsewhere, you must, and must be seen to, unsee it. If you don’t, Breach will come.

Because the book is introduced as science fiction, I found myself receptive to all sorts of explanations for how this separation worked and for the nature of the feared Breach who police it. Is this really taking place in a fictional Eastern European country near the Balkans? Or would the curtain pull back to reveal a fishbowl world in a science fictional universe? Were Breech simply secret police, feared for all the reasons authoritarian power is feared? Or were they an alien power possessed with magic? But for every hint that something deeper might be going on, further examination reveals only more human, more mundane explanations. If perception is reality, and you can convince yourself that you have unseen what is elsewhere, then it really is elsewhere. Perhaps you secretly have a little trouble convincing yourself that you really can’t see the towers of Ul Qoma from your window, but you’re the only one who seems to have this trouble, and you’d never admit it. Strange as it seems to live in a world where everyone denies what is in front of their face, you’d never challenge it. The price is too high.

This playful dancing around the possibility of the supernatural extends into the text itself. Rumors of a mythical ur-city, between and of the two drive speculation about the mythical origins of the twin cities, and even at the end of the book there is an archeological artifact with rumored power never explained. But, as in the real world, everything examined turns mundane. Members of Breach are able to disappear or coexist in two places at once by manipulating the perceptions of natives trained their whole lives to unsee, and the primary antagonist is similarly able to manipulate people’s perceptions by careful study of the signifiers, the ways of moving and holding yourself that declare, “I am in Beszel” or “I am in Ul Qoma.”

The book reads like science fiction. Not because of the subject matter, but the way it is discussed. We may argue over whether such a bifurcated city could ever be brought into existence, and I certainly have my own doubts about how long it could sustain itself, but there isn’t anything fundamentally impossible about it. There are other things that do exist in the world that I would have trouble crediting if I didn’t know they were real because of how foreign they are to my own experience. But like much of science fiction, The City & The City uses a fictional city to comment on real forces in the world, in this case governmental oppression and the way in which we can be complicit in maintaining it over ourselves. Moreover it reveals the nature of the world over time through passages like the one I quoted above, not setting out to directly discuss the setting which is so important to the nature of the book, but revealing it piece by piece through the eyes of a native who doesn’t find the world strange at all.

In that way, The City & The City manages to pull off the same trick performed by Breach. It exists simultaneously in two worlds, able to be seen from each, but existing in neither and both. It is a science fiction novel, wearing a science fiction novel’s clothes and adopting a science fiction novel’s mannerisms. Yet it is also a novel about fictional people in the real world, tackling a subject no more fantastic than most crime dramas. And by being so, it is visible to people of both worlds and calls into question the rationality of believing in the division between them.

The narrative is told in the first person by Anthony Webster, a British man who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, looking back over his life. From the beginning it is clear that there is a story being told, some greater point to the anecdotes, but exactly what that is doesn’t come into focus until much closer to the ending (and while it’s far from the point of the book, I won’t spoil the details here). The narrator begins with a few flashes of memory. Images. The kind of tokens you hold onto that aren’t memories per se, but have come to represent them. The sense of them, as the title suggests. Much of the novel focuses on the snap judgements we make when telling ourselves someone else’s story, and these led me to one of my own. In those first few lines, I assumed we were hearing the story of the arc of a man’s relationship with his wife. Like so many of the Tony’s own assumptions, mine was quite wrong.

Over the first half of the novel, there isn’t even a narrative as such. Instead the flashes of memory spread out and become anecdotes as if living out the transition from memory to story. This sounds as thought it might be tiresome or dull or fail to hang together, and perhaps it might be if the book weren’t so short. As it is, the memories expand into vignettes that give the impression of a life. We’re led along to extrapolate from these an impression of the narrator’s formative years, his boyhood friends, and his first love affair. It’s an impression, perhaps, something like what the man holds of himself.

But it isn’t the story of his life. What you’d think would be most important, meeting his wife, his career, his daughter, his divorce, his grandchildren, all pass by in a glancing mention. “I’d left home, and started work as a trainee in arts administration. Then I met Margaret; we married, and three years later Susie was born.” By the end of the paragraph, they are divorced. By the end of the next page, we’re brought through grandchildren and retirement to the present, all stated as a matter of fact.

Perhaps to Tony all of that is simply the present. No need to think too hard on the realities of life. It is what it is. You don’t reminisce about today. Who he is now is self-evident.

Instead of bringing his portrait into the current moment, Tony doubles back on the past. The beginning of the book paints a portrait, through remembered anecdotes of Tony’s school friends, most particularly Adrian who became, in memory at least, the focal point of their little group. The next part is a portrait of Tony’s first, failed love affair in college with a girl named Veronica. She never seems to like him all that much, though that is, of course, tinted by his knowledge of where it all goes, and it’s all tied up in adolescent sex, or the lack of it. The infra-sex, as he terms it, that he’s thrilled to have, and the ever-near presence of the full-sex that he doesn’t. He takes her to meet his friends. He stays with her family for a weekend and meets her mocking, disapproving father, her sly, indifferent brother, and her kind, reassuring mother. Then it ends, through one last bout of sex, and before long he learns she’s dating his friend, Adrian.

After pretending everything is fine, he writes them, or rather writes Adrian, addressing them both, and tells them exactly how he really feels, which is hurt and not very highly of either of them. Then, feeling good about having the last word, he writes them out of his life and turns to a new one, the one he so matter-of-factly portrays. When he returns from his first step, a trip around America, it’s to learn Adrian has committed suicide. It isn’t, it seems, out of depression, but because he decided it was his right and the right thing to do and so it would have been a moral failing not to. Tony and his surviving friends meet and mourn Adrian, but he doesn’t think much about Veronica, and without Adrian at its center, their group disperses to live out the rest of their own lives.

Then, years later, in the present day, Tony learns he’s been named in Vernoica’s mother’s will. She’s left him £500 and Adrian’s journal. When at last he gets in touch with Veronica to try to figure out why she left him the money and to claim the journal, she calls the former blood money refuses to turn over the latter. What he gets instead is a copy of the letter he had sent them. It isn’t witty. It isn’t even passionate. It’s just cruel and petty and, in light of Adrian’s suicide, tragic. And so he’s forced to reconcile his vision of himself, who has hardly thought of Veronica in years, and scarcely remembers what he wrote, with the one Veronica remembers, the man who sent that letter. And the Veronica he remembers, the capricious, posh, even cruel woman, with the one he’s now met again, who won’t tell him anything of her life, but seems to still live in that past he left behind.

So his goal shifts from claiming what is his to making sense of who she is, going back over his assumptions about her and about her family. Is her brother the sneering aristocrat he assumed or a disappointed man, saving face? Was her mother a kind woman, looking to shield him from her capricious daughter, or a jealous woman in competition with her? Was Veronica a bitter, cynical opportunist who attached herself to the brightest around her, or a woman who never got to have a life of her own and lived out the remainder of her days taking care of Adrian’s legacy? And who, given all that, is he? The patient, complacent man, on good terms with his ex-wife even though she left him for another man? Or the hurtful man who is only there when there is something to be gained, be it sex, £500, or absolution?

We all have moments we look back on and cringe. And times when we wonder if we aren’t the sympathetic figures we imagine ourselves to be and are, as it turns out, the assholes of the story. And all but the least empathetic of us have had moments when our self-righteous indignation at someone else’s behavior has turned to shame when we get a better peek at their situation.

I have this one particular moment I flash back to when my brain decides I need a reminder of my imperfection. The film American Beauty came out shortly after I started my sophomore year in college, and I recall getting into the stupidest of pretentious arguments with a handful of my classmates (whose names I don’t even recall) in the dining hall. I hadn’t seen it yet. I’m fairly sure none of us had. Yet somehow I found myself defending the possibility that it might have artistic merit against their contention that Hollywood was, by definition, incapable of making something worthwhile. So far, so good, except insomuch as even participating in the argument makes me feel like I ought to have been calling things “philosophically self-evident.”

Where things went off the rails was the fact that I had recently heard something on NPR about Sam Shepard and managed to leave with the impression that American Beauty might have been an adaptation of a Sam Shepard play. I don’t know why I chose to bring this up. I wasn’t, and am not, terribly familiar with Sam Shepard’s oeuvre, and judging from the fact that they weren’t immediately sure I was wrong, they weren’t either. It’s an odd thing to fixate on. It’s trivial. It had no discernible direct consequences. And I’m sure it doesn’t crack the top ten of things I have reason to be ashamed of. But to this day, I’ll sometimes be walking along with my wife and out of nowhere, I’ll groan. And I won’t be able to explain to her what’s wrong, because what a silly thing to fixate on fifteen years later.

But the past works like that. I have little doubt that I have casually crushed people’s feelings, but I don’t remember those times. If someone from my past approached me with an accusation, or even just a rueful memory, how would I react? Would I feel ashamed? Or would I get angry because that person is trying to make me into someone I don’t believe I am? How many people, met briefly on the phone or in the street, or remembered in the past, am I doing that to right now? There’s the obvious case of ex-girlfriends who I can’t help but see with all reasons we would never have worked out hanging in a cloud around them. But worse are the people I don’t even know well at all, don’t even remember. The infuriating couple at the next table, the douchey guy on the train. It took only a comment or a look or someone’s bad day to paint a back story for them they wouldn’t recognize.

A couple months ago I saw this play out a few times in quick succession online. The most prominent was the so-called “Diane in 7A” incident where a reality TV producer named Elan Gale live-tweeted his interaction with a misbehaving middle aged woman who was throwing a tantrum over a delayed flight. It was perfect, too perfect, and it wasn’t long before everyone was discussing it, whether laughing at Dianne’s behavior or expressing disapproval of the crass way that Elan responded to it. Soon a man came forward claiming to be a relative of Dianne. He explained that she was facing a terminal cancer diagnosis and that this would likely have been her last Thanksgiving, explaining some of her overwrought behavior. And for a moment, reading along, I felt ashamed. It was easy to imagine at first an entitled over-privileged air-traveler, something we’ve all seen plenty of. Then, equally easy to about face and imagine a woman dealing with crushing personal tragedy, caught up in a miniature media circus. Of course it unsurprisingly turned out that the whole thing was a hoax. What else did we expect from someone who makes his living manipulating the supposedly real into dramatized stories? What story do we imagine for him?

As the internet brings us together, making it more likely that any two people in the world will have a fleeting interaction, we see this sort of thing happen more and more. Someone posts a picture or an anecdote (one I recall was of an older kid in a stroller) they think represents some trend they bemoan only to have someone who knows more background to come forward to plead for understanding (in this case stating that the kid in question had autism and that this was a coping mechanism). We’re simultaneously invited more and more frequently to guess at each other’s stories and given greater opportunities to know that our stories are being guessed at and to set the record straight. Or to have someone try to make us feel bad by making up a story.

So what are we to do? Judge not lest ye be judged? Stop trusting everything we believe about people? It’ll never happen. To function in society we need to make quick decisions about what to expect from people, lest we offend or be put in real danger. And we do it remarkably well, usually without realizing what we are doing. We read the little smiles, the twitches of the eyes and decide when it’s time to ask a question or when it’s time to keep your mouth shut. We guess who is going to lie to us because they can and who we can trust. We’re not always right, but giving up just means leaving human society. So perhaps all we can do is periodically sit back and reflect on our own lives and how little we know about our own stories, much less the stories of the people we meet along the way. And to be willing to listen to how different their story is from what we assumed, even if they keep telling us that we would never understand.

The story they tell might not agree with the one an observer from their left-facing Esso tiger, single moon world would give, but it is how they experienced it. Does that makes their story an allegory or some form of fabrication? Perhaps that’s a foolish question when it comes to fiction. It’s not unlike asking whether Dorothy’s trip to Oz really happened. Of course it didn’t, and then of course it did. It’s a fiction, and so a sort of lie, but then again a story, and so a sort of truth, and it’s status as both isn’t really affected by an author’s statement about the reality experienced by Dorothy in bed or Tengo in a hotel room in Tokyo. Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road had her adventures regardless of whether that Dorothy exists as a past version of the Dorothy in the “real” world. (Which world, of course, is just as fictional as Oz for all of being named Kansas.) Of course it’s a great deal more subtle in 1Q84, where the fantastical elements of that world are few, and where even those are not widely seen. This only serves to emphasize the foolishness of the distinction. After all, our memory of the past is always a fiction.¹

The place Tengo finds himself at the end of the book isn’t so strange. Or, rather, it is very strange, but also commonplace. Tengo, like so many of Murakami’s protagonists is just over edge of thirty. Like many at that age, at the start of the book his life has settled into a period of perpetual transition. Not a lot changes, but there is little solidly established about it. He rents a small apartment with few worldly possessions. While he displays great talents as both a mathematics teacher and an author, he’s made little mark in either field. No doubt some students remember him fondly, but he isn’t even a full time professor, only teaching courses to help students cram for their entrance exams. In the context of 1980s Japan, with a culture of lifetime employment, this temporary status is all the more profound.² Likewise he seems to lack commitment to his writing. He considers it his primary ambition, but he seems content to take it slow, wandering about trying to find his style, doing petty tasks for his mentor, Komatsu, an editor at a literary magazine.

His social life isn’t much more grounded. He has a few friends, it seems, but they don’t play any active role in his life or the novel. His family consists of his father from whom he is estranged. Even his romantic life seems designed to avoid commitment while simultaneously preventing change. He sees an older, married girlfriend exactly once a week. He seems genuinely fond of her, and she expresses a possessiveness toward him, but he can’t even contact her directly. The relationship is tailor made to satisfy his minimum needs for intimacy without any danger of developing further.

By the end of the novel, Tengo has, essentially, a family. You could imagine a much more mundane path from here to there than occurs in the book. Tengo, lonely, even if he doesn’t quite realize it himself, meets a woman he shared a moment of innocent intimacy with when they were children. They rekindle their feelings for each other almost immediately, and before he knows it, she is pregnant and they are starting a life together. Like I say, a familiar story, but one that surely feels world-changing when it happens to you.

It is worth, also, considering the significance of that moment when they held hands as children, and the way they each fixate on it. How much was their fixation with each other something that preexisted their romance, and how much is it a part of the narrative that they weave after the fact? A piece of magic when viewed as the foundation of their new lives and the life of their child, a fleeting memory, otherwise. After all, the mutual fixation seems to appear out of nowhere mid-story. Though they both take it for granted and carry it forward into the new world where they are a couple, it has the contrived feeling of an element from the 1Q84 world, not the original, right-facing Esso tiger world. Perhaps the extra significance both Tengo and Aomame place on that moment is a part of the fictional world Tengo has created.

How do you explain such a profound change in your life? When you can’t imagine what your life would be if you hadn’t met someone? When it seems like some great force in the universe must have arranged the chances just so, in order to make your life possible? (When, of course, any other life you might have had would also have been a sequence of seemingly fated events, because they are the events that happened.)

Most of us do it by telling a story, even if we don’t realize what we are doing. It’s not usually so fanciful. Even if we use the word “fate,” we rarely put a face to it. But we do invent a story, picking out the events we see as significant after the fact, simplifying them, putting them in order, and speaking of how we looked across the room and knew, or, even if we didn’t, we will at least speak of that party, that glance, that holding of hands, that kiss. And while we might not have the imagination to invoke a conspiracy of little people or to explain the suddenness of going from a loner to expecting a child with a virgin birth,³ sometimes that is how it feels.

As an aside, I was convinced for a while early on that the Aomame portions were written by Tengo. That they were, perhaps, actual excerpts from his draft. So Tengo, reminded of Aomame when he sees the mother and daughter Society of Witness members on the train, comes to wonder what happened to her over the years and invents a life for her. He makes her the protagonist of his story set in the world of Air Chrysalis and falls for her, imagining that she might be out there remembering him. Of course this doesn’t fit with his assumptions about her later on when he starts actively seeking her, but it’s an interesting idea within the context of her being pulled into the 1Q84 world.

So I appreciate the way in which 1Q84 paints the way the great changes of life can feel. How unreal, and overwrought, and also deeply, crushingly, mundane it can all be at once.⁴ Unfortunately the way it gets there isn’t without its flaws. For the record, since this is the first article of this type I am writing, I don’t see the need to write literal book reviews in the sense of appraisal of quality (and I’ll never hand out a score). Either there is something worth writing about or not. But I can’t see writing about 1Q84 without discussing what a frustrating book it was to read. When it’s good, it’s really good, but there were times when the force driving me to keep turning the pages was a desire not to get to the next bit, but to be done with the current section more quickly.

It’s not that the book is too long, though it is a long book, or even that it starts slow, though it does. I rather felt that the deliberate pace of most of the book contributed to the mood, and while I found the setup of the whole “literary conspiracy” to have Tengo ghost-rewrite Air Chrysalis a bit strained,⁵ the initial introductions of Tengo, Aomame, and Eriko were all intriguing enough to make me want to read more. And while there are a number of digressions throughout the book, such as the discussion of the Gilyaks, even those aren’t the problem and when they work, they add depth and texture to the world.

Where it falls down is in repetition. The whole book felt badly in need, ironically, of an editor’s rewrite. It isn’t enough to mention the stakes should their fraud in rewriting Eriko’s novel come to light. They have to do it again and again, taking what is a somewhat contrived situation as it is and throwing it, repeatedly, to the foreground where it’s flaws stand out. We are reminded repeatedly that this might be dangerous to the point that when the cracks do begin to show it produces anticlimax more than a building of dread. Whole sections of (admittedly important) character background are introduced only to be largely repeated not half the book away, but in the very next section. For an author who seems to generally trust his readers to either pick up on things or not, this book seemed uncharacteristically blunt in places. Tengo’s childhood Sundays going door to door with his father and their similarity to Aomame’s are repeated to the point where one feels little need to ask whether it will be on the exam.

And that’s all unfortunate, because the world that Murakami builds is a compelling one, and if he had trusted readers to pick up on those important bits of Tengo’s history without the many retellings, he might have had more time to explore any number of bits of beautiful strangeness that he only hints at. In the end, we’re left with a flawed but worthwhile read. No, the threads don’t all tie together at the end, and you are left with little understanding of the mechanisms by which the 1Q84 world operate, but those elements aren’t the main point of the book. The point, in my mind anyway, is to induce that eery feeling of not knowing your place in the world and to explore how your view of the world changes as you decide what that place should be. And on that score, 1Q84 succeeds.

Maintaining a constant stream of interesting posts, even when you define interesting within the narrow context of friends and family is a real challenge and takes real talent. Yet without that steady stream there is little point to a blog. The chronological stream of brief posts is tailored to the assumption of a regular drip of new content that is relevant when fresh and fades from interest over time. Social networks solve this problem, to some extent, but the space never really belongs to you, and over time the contributions fade away, rather than collecting into a body of work.

As hinted by the name, Stale Bread Lunch is not that sort of website. My goal here is that each article should be able to stand on its own, not simply be a part of a stream. That means I’m not particularly interested in being timely or responding to events as they happen. Instead, I hope to produce fewer, but higher quality articles.

At launch I’m focusing on one of my primary interests, novels, though I intend to broaden out into other subjects with time. I have prepared three articles (beyond this introductory note) on three novels, each dealing with themes of perception, memory, and reality: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, and The City & The City by China Miéville.

These aren’t reviews, per se, at least not in terms of an evaluation of quality. I struggled some finding a label and landed on the term “book club.” That is the atmosphere I’d like to foster, more a discussion of themes in the book I found interesting than a recommendation about what to buy. On that note, a word about spoilers: While I don’t go out of my way to spoil anything, these articles aren’t directed at people trying to decide whether to read the books discussed, but at people interested in discussion about them. My own attitude on spoilers is one of caution. I certainly don’t like it when anyone intentionally or maliciously tries to spoil something for me because they don’t understand why someone might want to be surprised. That said, avoiding spoilers neuters any real discussion. So in my own reading, I play it by ear, asking only that I’m not ambushed by spoilers so I can make my own decisions. That’s the policy I intend to follow here. I’ll keep the front pages clear, but once you get to the article itself, all bets are off. You have been warned.

Along with full length articles, I have the “Breadcrumbs” section. That is where I intend to put anything that doesn’t rise to the level of an article. Breadcrumbs aren’t so fully-formed, are more time-sensitive, or are the kind of thing I simply wouldn’t say if I had to put the level of thought or preparation that goes into an article. In other words, it is the blog portion of the site.

Any other questions are, I hope, answered here in the FAQ.

Welcome to Stale Bread Lunch.

—Michael James Boyle

March, 2014

Unfortunately, all these formats, for the most part, solve the wrong problems. This excellent article by Monty from Xiph.org, and even more so the followup video,¹ go into the technical details as to why. In extreme brief, yes it is, in fact, possible to perfectly reproduce any analog waveform you might want with 16 bits sampled at 44.1 kHz (CD quality). Properly conducted listening tests bear this out. So just increasing the sampling frequency won’t get you anything (and might even hurt).

So why am I sympathetic, then? Because most available music is made in such a way that it doesn’t come close to exploiting the quality available in “CD quality” sound. This means that music mastered for a new—scarequote—audiophile format might end up being better, even if the format isn’t any better, simply because the people doing the mastering know it is being targeted at people who want to play the audio on good equipment in a quiet room and get the most out of it.

The biggest problems with audio today come from a combination of the loudness war and the fact that engineers, rightly, target their music for playback on a wide variety of equipment, with the knowledge that many, perhaps most, will listen to it through pack-in earbuds and car stereos. High dynamic range is not your friend under these circumstances, and if you most of your listeners won’t hear the subtle bits unless you compress them² it makes sense to do that and sacrifice some quality for the tiny percentage of listeners sitting in a quiet room with big speakers. This is a large part of the reason why vinyl LPs can sometimes sound better than CDs (beyond issues of subjective preferences). They’re often a different master, encoded in an inferior medium, but targeted at superior equipment.

So what would be a better solution? The problems of targeting and preference are never going to go away. In fact if a new, high resolution format were to take off, it would eventually get just as bad as CDs, because engineers would stop being able to make assumptions about the people who buy it. But we can now do much of that work on the fly at the time of playback. What I’d like to see is a format that encoded (at standard 16 bits/44khz and with high quality, high bitrate, lossy data compression) uncompressed, neutrally balanced, audio but was designed to play back with presets based on the equipment used. So the default could apply compression and an engineer supplied equalizer setup that mimicked current audio recordings, targeted at small speakers in loud environments. Play it back on a computer or phone without knowing anything or changing any defaults and nothing changes. However, you could dig in, uncheck a box, or select “high quality headphones” or “large speakers” or something of the like³ and you get the version with full dynamic range and equalizer tuning for those situations.

The advantage of this is that it doesn’t take any more space than we currently use and people who don’t care can keep on not caring and still buy the same music. Sound engineers, who no doubt would love to listen to music not mixed for $10 earbuds, can make the mix that they would like to listen to available without producing a version that will get them complaints from 90% of their audience. And we consumers who would like to be able to put on a pair of nice headphones or sit in our quiet living rooms with big speakers, and listen to every bit of the music we can get out of them, can play the same music through a car stereo and hear a mix that’s designed to make the right compromises.

In brief, Google’s argument was that this is fair use, the oft cited, but rarely litigated principle that copyright doesn’t prevent certain activities that naturally flow from using the work or are in the common good. The Author’s Guild argued, basically, that even if Google wasn’t wholesale distributing the works, they were profiting off of them by scanning them and using them as targets for search queries alongside which they placed ads. This was something, they felt, that the copyright holders had a right to do, or not do, for themselves.

The optimistic view of this ruling is that it provides a high profile stamp of approval to the principle of fair use, making the flow of ideas easier, and making it more difficult for corporations or estates to lock down pieces of the common culture, preventing them from being used in new and interesting ways because they are afraid that they can’t anticipate the consequences.

The pessimistic view is that this is less about fair use and more about the big guy wins. Intellectual property law is ever more becoming a tool for large corporations, not a basic protection for individual creators. In that light, this ruling is hard to see without a twinge of fear that the principle on display here isn’t fair use, but what the bigger, wealthier guy wants to do.

I can only hope that when it is the movie industry against an individual or small firm or a conglomeration of individual authors trying to defend their rights on safer ground, the ruling there will defend the principle of fairness and not the creed that the activity of our economic titans must not be disturbed.

It’s always great to see someone attempt measure things people usually just assume, but taking on the name “Science” also brings some risks. When we apply science to our everyday lives it’s hard not to take shortcuts that wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) fly doing it “for real.” That’s understandable. You’d think measuring such everyday things would be an easier task than the work that goes on in labs, but really it’s often much harder due to the much squishier, poorly controllable subjects. No one is expecting a clinical trial here… But then again there’s a reason that is required when the results really matter.

I should point out that Seth Brown’s about page states that he has a background in computational genomics. I have no doubt that he is well aware of everything I’m about to point out here and is a far more qualified statistician than I am with my less computational developmental biology background. And indeed he points out some of these issues himself. That said, let’s take a closer look at some of his results and use them to think about two things: the pitfall of expecting a big result and the danger in assumptions about what you are really testing.

First let’s look at his marquee result. Seth found that he could not measure a significant difference between using a burr grinder vs a blade grinder to prepare coffee for brewing with an Aeropress for his guests. This is set up to be a surprising conclusion due to a set of a few assumptions:

1. That a burr grinder’s purpose is to improve the taste of the brewed coffee.
2. That a taster must be able to reliably state a preference in a blind test for it to qualify. (As opposed to, say, something that might arise out of a longer-running survey.)
3. That any individual element in the brewing system should, on its own, be able to make for a striking difference in quality. (Versus, say, more complicated combinations of grinding and brewing methods.)

I’m not saying that those are bad or unreasonable assumptions. In particular numbers 2 and 3 come out of a critical need to limit the scope of the experiment to something achievable. But it is important to be aware of them. What he found was that his guests stated a preference for coffee brewed from beans ground by the blade grinder over the burr grinder at about the rate of a coin flip. So being unable to prove that the burr grinder outperforms a blade grinder, a burr grinder is a useless expense, right? Here he falls into a frequent problem with presenting science to the general public. His result is a failure of his assay to tell a difference between the two conditions. As he goes on to state below, he doesn’t have the power to detect subtle differences. This means we can’t be sure whether we should make a conclusion about the difference in grinders or about the assay.

But before he gets the the details, he expresses this lack of result as follows, “Surprisingly, 13/24 or, ~ 54% of subjects actually preferred the blade grinder. This data suggested that blade grinders might actually produce better tasting coffee than burr grinders.” Seth knows this is a premature conclusion and his next step is to go on to perform the statistics. But if we were talking about, say, public health research, the article written about this research would be very likely to stop there. We have our result! Blade better than burr! Of course an educated reader should know better, but this demonstrates how difficult it can be to talk carefully about science.

What actually happened? He had a weak assay (because it would be a monumental task to produce a strong one) and one of his assumptions was that he’d see a large difference and that the difference would be one of coffee taste. If the benefit of a burr grinder turns out to be subtle or to be beneficial for other reasons (such as allowing different brews) he’d be unable to pick up on it, but because of the way he presents the data, this isn’t the message that a reader would be likely to take away. Though it most certainly isn’t what he’s trying to say, a naive reader might come to the conclusion that he is arguing that blade grinders are fundamentally better for coffee taste than burr grinders.

That’s a presentation issue and Seth’s audience is an informed one. What about the result? We can agree that in his tested brewing method, grinding via blade vs burr doesn’t make a mind blowing difference. That conclusion is solid. But let’s take a closer look at the assay and see what else might have been going on. The assumption was that a burr grinder is going to produce better coffee grounds. I’d argue that’s not the primary purpose of a burr grinder. It’s really there to produce more consistent grinds. When tasting coffee the most striking feature is the overall strength. Plenty of other features matter, but that’s the one out front. It’s a little like the loudness of music. One set of speakers might be better than another, but a quick listen will always tend to favor the louder of the two. Moving beyond that takes much more careful testing.

Coffee strength depends on many factors, but one of the most important is the size of the grounds. Smaller grounds give better access of the coffee to the water (it’s a classic surface area to volume deal) so all other factors being equal more coffee will end up in the water in a shorter period of time if the particles of coffee are smaller. By grinding with a burr grinder, you are likely to reliably hit a narrow range of particle sizes. Using a blade grinder will produce a much wider range with some very fine powder and some coarser fragments. It will also be very difficult to get the same average grind size between repetitions.

So if we assume that the grind size produced by the burr grinder is the midpoint, the blade grinder would be pretty likely to fluctuate randomly between producing larger on average vs smaller on average particles, and therefore half the time the coffee produced by the blade grinder might come out stronger than the burr grinder and half the time weaker. Whether that is better or worse depends on the preference of the taster, but either way, what could easily be the most dominant factor in taste is going to flip randomly between the two cups. As long as strength is a more important factor than any other differences produced between the two, this would be enough to drive a 50% result right there, even if the less important factor would otherwise have been noticeable in the assay. So the conclusion might be that the difference between burr and blade grinders is very subtle… or it might be that it is simply more subtle than coffee strength, a rather expected result when you phrase it like that, given how important a factor strength is.

It’s hard to say whether this is what was really going on here or not. It’s quite possible that the differences in strength were too subtle to measure as well or that the blade grinder always produced stronger or weaker coffee. But I thought this was a lovely example of how the results of an experiment can sometimes be telling you as much about what is going on in the assay and in your assumptions as they can about the thing you’re trying to test. So it’s important, even when trying to talk to a lay audience to try to talk about these factors and avoid the temptation to oversimplify them away, even though that’s usually what the general public wants.

So do I think Seth was wrong? Absolutely not! He concludes that you can make a fantastic cup of coffee with a blade grinder and an Aeropress. That you can. In fact, it’s one of the reasons an Aeropress is such a popular brewing method. It’s very flexible and very tolerant to different brewing situations. Unlike a french press, you don’t have to worry about the super fine grinds that may be produced as a part of the blade grinding process. And unlike drip brewing you can (to some varying extents depending on the technique you use) immerse the grounds for as long as you need, giving the larger particles the time they need to soak.

But I still think a burr grinder is a good investment for a coffee lover. Not all brewing methods are so forgiving. I’ve made halfway decent espresso with a blade grinder. It’s possible, but it is hit or miss at the very best and is never great. Even more importantly, I see a burr grinder much like a kitchen scale. You wouldn’t expect a kitchen scale to improve the quality of the coffee you weigh out. But it makes measuring out a specific amount of coffee much easier. Similarly a burr grinder lets you dial in a specific setting and just let it go, giving you just what you ordered every time. That may not directly lead to a striking difference in coffee taste, but it leads to a much better overall experience and certainly reduces the potential for making a bad cup of coffee because you screwed up.

This happens all the time. I’m regularly amazed by how people who appear to have little direct connection (besides being connected through my own interest in their work) seem inevitably to find each other. It’s easy to imagine some big playhouse where they all hang out and the app makers are playing a board game with the independent journalists while some game developers are hanging out across the room with a musician discussing books whose authors are off playing their video games.

The image is at once aspirational and jealousy-inspiring. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when, an hour later, I saw a discussion unfold about whether the just-completed XOXO-fest was nothing more than a cool-kids club.

XOXO-fest, as best I can tell, is, more or less, a conference designed to make my playhouse a reality for a few days. I know nothing about it beyond the fact that a significant fraction of the people I follow seem to be somehow involved with (or at least paying attention to) it. It brings together a cross-section of people who make things in a largely—scare quotes—indie fashion to talk to each other about how they make things. And having watched some other festivals and conferences devolve as they grew,² they appear to be trying to respond to their success without growing too fast beyond the intimacy that defines them.

I’m not so terribly interested in the good or bad behavior of the conference organizers. It’s a tough problem to solve, keeping the atmosphere of your conference intimate and engaging without appearing to be (or flat out being) elitist assholes. What is more interesting to me is how we react to the notion of all those cool kids out there living the life.

Most of us weren’t popular in high school, or at least didn’t think we were, and we don’t think of ourselves as cool kids now. One of the most simultaneously encouraging and depressing notions I’ve encountered is the fact that few people whoa are successful in their fields don’t feel that they are faking it. It’s natural to transfer the feelings of resentment we may have had toward the popular kids in high school on those connected, successful creators in their playhouse. And further, to wonder, if our desire to be among them is as empty, and pathetic, as a high school outsider trying to get an invite to the jock’s table.

And that’s where the comparison breaks down. In high school, for the most part, popularity wasn’t based on achievement. Not really. Not even achievement in the sports most schools seem set up to reward. For one, high school students simply haven’t had much time to achieve. Mostly, popularity was based on proximity to the popular. How you got the nod didn’t matter so much, whether it was wealth, a team affiliation, beauty, or even honest friendship, what mattered was that you were in. And if you weren’t, you wanted to be.

But when I look toward those indies in their imaginary playhouse, I’m not looking for friends, or an invite to a party. Sure those things would be nice. They seem like great people, for the most part, and I bet their parties have great decorations. What I really want is to have made something good enough that people who make things I respect notice. That I could meet the a developer who worked on one of my favorite games and have them tell me, “Oh, hey, you wrote X. I loved that.”

The desire to be a part of that kind of club seems, to me anyway, a much healthier aspiration. And to be clear it isn’t the only, or primary, reason I’m driven to make things. I’m not looking for the things I make to be a ticket to some insider’s club. And I’m sure that no matter how successful I ever get, I, too, will always feel I’m faking it. Also, to be sure, there’s plenty of cronyism, cliques, and discrimination in the adult world. But it’s important to separate true admiration of role models from sycophantic admiration of the popular for popularity’s sake, even when they can be a little hard to tell apart at times.