In my previous entry, I made a throwaway reference to “blogging community standards.” I just want to make a clarification: I believe in no such thing.

First, “standards”. Some people believe that to “properly” blog, one must link copiously to other bloggers and provide permanent links to all your entries. For example, recently some blowhards decided to give Andrew Sullivan a hard time for violating these precepts. Sullivan had no time for such nonsense:

But can I say a word about the notion of a “blogging community” to which we allegedly owe obligations, deference and respect? Phooey. The reason I’m a blogger is because I’m a pesky individualist who simply wants to write what I think and have a great interaction with readers in real time. Every time I hear the word “community,” my bullshit detector goes off. And when I hear about “obligations to the community” blah blah blah, I wanna retch. I have nothing but respect for my fellow bloggers. I read them; I’ve encouraged others to blog; I link whenever I find something I find interesting; I believe in the genre; I’ve lost lucrative jobs for the medium. But please don’t start creating some sort of community of bloggers, and calling us on our dues. This is the Wild Web, buddy, not a condo association. Don’t tread on me.

Some blogs are totally link-happy, with just a few sentences of commentary. Some blogs are essay or journal-oriented, and have maybe one or two links at best. Some blogs, like this one, are somewhere in the middle. Is any one style better than any other? I think not.

Second, “community”. If there really is a “blogosphere” out there, its sole unifying characteristic is the compulsion to rip to shreds any article that dares criticize the blogging phenomenon even a little bit. Several months ago I was monitoring two groups of bloggers: a somewhat lefty group centered around Silicon Valley programmers such as Dave Winer, and a somewhat righty group, the “Warbloggers”, centered around people such as Glenn Reynolds. To my great amusement, neither group seemed to be aware of the other. In fact, at one point both groups were having simultaneous conversations on the question, “Where are all the [right-wing|left-wing] bloggers?” Each group even proposed its own theories on why their superior, cutting-edge ideology made them more hip to the whole blogging phenomenon.

Here’s the deal. At best, the “blogosphere” is fractured into thousands of subcommunities, because people don’t link randomly; they link to blogs that they like. There are political blogs, blogs about science fiction writing, blogs about the Macintosh, blogs that are entirely about personal sexual confessions (and God help you if you find yourself dating one of those people). All of these communities reinforce each other and tend to shunt away blogs that are not of interest. And you know what? That’s the way it should be. As for imposing your local community standards on everybody else… well, I believe there’s a Supreme Court case revolving around that very issue, but that’s another story.

We had ourselves a wee little earthquake earlier this week. It started out as a 5.2, but it’s since been downgraded to a 4.9. Either way it was about two magnitudes too small to relieve any significant fault stress and make “the Big One” less likely… but it was kind of cute, as quakes go.

So at 11:30pm last night, I found myself waiting in line for a midnight showing of Star Wars, Episode II. I had not been very enthusiastic about the Attack of the Clones in the first place, but Nancy was very insistent that we see it. So there we all were: Me, her, Pat, Sam, Sue, and Nancy’s dad. Nancy’s mom, however, was missing. I do not want to shirk my duty in pointing out that Nancy lost her disabled and elderly mother in the crowd.

But I digress. Here’s a quick take on the movie, with only one very indirect spoiler:

• Special effects and scenery: superb
• Dialogue: adequate to wretched
• Future Dark Lord of the Sith Anakin Skywalker: pouty and whiny
• Interesing hint of moral ambiguity regarding the bad guy: raised, and then casually thrown away

Lucas has always been a prodigy with technology… and the few interviews I’ve seen with him make him seem like an awfully nice, sincere guy… but why oh why can’t he write? Or trust others to do it for him? Very frustrating.

In Other News: Shari, a friend from my MOTWM class, set me a note about Jonathan Safran Foer, a young Jewish writer whose last name differs from mine by only one consonant. Foer has just published his debut novel, he’s three years younger than me, he’s getting rave reviews from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Kirkus Reviews, and he can apparently get away with referring to Nietzche multiple times when talking about his own writing.

But heck, forget Foer — at 24, he’s all washed up, isn’t he? If you want a real prodigy, there’s Aaron Swartz. Aaron is the member of several web standards committees, he co-authored RSS1.0, and he writes clearly and concisely (with a wicked sense of humor). And he’s fifteen years old.

On the other hand, things are going quite well for me these days. For example, at Tuesday Night Poker, this old man won ten dollars this week. I even got a natural Royal Flush in a seven-card stud hand. Unfortunately, as Page points out, I’m still seventy dollars in the hole, lifetime.

Well, that which does not kill you makes you stronger… or something like that.

An anonymous reader writes with a suggestion for a punishment for Enron employees: make them serve time on treadmills that are hooked up to little turbines, in order to repay Californians for the mess they caused last year.

Now that’s the kind of innovative, dynamic thinking that we need these days. However, while the idea is on the right track, it’s a bit… inefficient. I mean, how much power can you get out of a fat, sweating, Houston energy trader anyway? No, for a truly clean and efficient energy solution, I think we would need to mulch the employees and use them as biomass fuel. Get some power back and lighten up the job market a bit to boot.

Speaking of Thinking Different, I stopped by the Apple Store in Palo Alto this evening. By some bizarre coincidence, Charlie Clouser (the synth player for Nine Inch Nails) was giving a presentation on how he uses his Mac to do professional songwriting and remixing. He took us through a song he developed for the band Opiate for the Masses. I didn’t understand any of the technical jargon, but it was pretty cool nonetheless. As he constructed the song in the synthesizer program, Reason, he showed us that the CPU usage was negligible, no matter how many effects he piled on. He also claimed that most electronic artists could record an entire album with Reason and Ableton alone. In fact, according to Clouser, there is no sonic reason to use expensive dedicated equipment — the only thing that the “traditional” method gives you is better ergonomics and a few extra features for the hard-core professional.

I wonder if he’s right? Well, unfortunately, I don’t have hundreds of dollars to drop on the software — never mind my tin ear.

For the last thirty years, Harvey Mudd has had a class called, “Media Studio“. The purpose of Media Studio is to help scientists and engineers use technology to uncover their artistic sides. Every year Media Studio culminates in a public show that, by now, has become encrusted with traditions. These range from jokes the emcees are supposed to tell (“The Rope Joke!” “Razzle and Dazzle!”) to recitations of the privations endured to produce the media projects (“We’ve gotten three hours of sleep this week!”) to… interesting diversions (“The Pickle Trick!”).

Now, in the Days Of Yore, the technology consisted of a weird slide projector that had nine slide carousels. You could synchronize the slide show with music or voice. You could also do various tricks like fading in, splitting the screen, and and displaying slides in rapid succession. Primitive stuff.

The best shows were usually the silly ones. For example, there was the “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” spoof that had park rangers sneaking around Claremont, anesthetizing various residents and “taking them away to a new hab-i-tat.” There was also “Penguin-Man” (written long before the rise of Linux), wherein our hero is bitten by a radioactive penguin and acquires the appropriate superpowers (the ability to survive when locked in a freezer, the ability to instantly change from street clothes into a tuxedo). Aside from these occasional demented works of genius, most of the shows were, to put it gently, pretty lame. But in a good way.

Anyway, two years ago the college got a huge grant that enabled them to switch everything over to digital video. New G4 Macs, Final Cut Pro, the works. Sounds good at first… but the new technology comes with its own set of problems.

For one thing, the old technology masked bad acting. Media Studio projects always starred students and professors — non-actors. That was OK, because the old system involved shooting still photos and adding voiceovers. This allowed the mind to fill in the gaps, so acting ability was almost irrelevant. But with digital video, everything’s out in the open. For example, one of this year’s shows revolved around a woman who was supposed to be a serious runner, an athlete. Unfortunately, when this particular person ran, she didn’t look very athletic at all. With the old slide-projector system, we would have seen just a few still shots of her running, which would have conveyed the idea just fine.

For another thing, the new format encourages computer animation. Computer animation is cool… but it is a serious technical challenge to implement, and I think that the focus on getting the code to render makes it hard to focus on telling an actual story. For example, there was a piece that was about some starfighters battling in outer space. The guy who did it spent the entire year working on it. The piece was maybe at the level of the animation in Babylon 5 — pretty darn impressive for just one kid with a desktop. However, when the audience asked the student about the story behind the space battle, he said, “Well… there’s these organic-looking ships, probably the bad guys, and these metallic-looking ships, probably the good guys… and they’re fighting over this warp gate.”

The student spent a year working on this, and that’s all he had for his story? I don’t know whether to be astounded by his technical proficiency, or just profoundly depressed.

I suppose the jury’s still out on Media Studio 2.0. But so far it doesn’t look good… and to cap things off, the emcee forgot to tell the Rope Joke this year. I just don’t know what they’re teaching the kids these days.