Seven Lions

Against all intuition and spurred by willful nostalgia, I went out and bought the 4th (5th?  18th?) Edition Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide.  I remember the halcyon days of yore, when I would spend hours of nerdy bliss reading about spheres of annihilation or various bits of Vecna–and even occasionally playing the games with others (which, in my experience, invariably proved that CRPGs didn’t turn gaming into a manic-obsessive tactical combat and resource gathering exercises, it simply did it with incredible graphics).  Of course, if you done what I done, then you know what I’m about to say.

It’s horrible.  It’s indescribably bad.  I had to go pick up an old MERPS scenario just to get the Pepsi flavor out of my mouth.  Apparently, despite the sublime comedy of Order of the Stick, AD&D can officially now stand for Attention Deficit and Disorder.  So I did what any right-thinking modern individual would, and I checked to see how the copyright works on good ol’ 1st Edition and it turns out you can’t copyright rules (I don’t know how WotC managed to trademark or patent or otherwise legally absorb tapping, maybe that was all just a dream…) and, sure enough, a bunch of good folks (who probably hold Richard Stallman in higher esteem than I) have already produced OSRIC, the Old School Reference and Index Compilation or, to put it another way, all of 1st Edition minus the Mind Flayers, blurry cats and balls o’ eyes.

Imagine a world where anyone can discover a +5 scimitar, regardless of whether or not they want to have dragonpeople come along for the ride (don’t get me wrong, I thought Dragonlance, while kinda drawn out and cheesy, way okay, and anyway, it’s Samson Agonistes compared to 4th Edition).

I’ve stumbled upon an imbroglio:  Apple hates Flash.

I had no idea until Stanford got me an iPhone and said “Develop scholarly digital media for mobile devices!” and I said, “Yeah, sure–John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Mobile Edition!”

And then I found out that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, and that Steve Jobs thinks Flash is awful because it makes Safari crash and that the only way to get your Flash app working on an iPhone or iPad is to use some packager from Adobe that isn’t even out yet.

Way to go, Nintendo.  Seriously, now that Apple has locked in a revenue stream by controlling the applications that run on their proprietary mobile environment, they’re happy to lock out the greatest tool for rich internet applications because they, claim, it’s not open.  It’s two issues, really:  Apple wants to break the chokehold Flash Video has on the net, and I don’t give a hoot about that, but I do care about issue two: Apple wants to control the “software processes” that run on its little closed-core world, and that sounds like it puts Apple on the wrong side of 1984.  The amazing genesis of Web 2.0 came about because of platform-independent application environments, not because of Quicktime.  Closing down the fun little platform that Apple has created means someone like me, who already knows a perfectly usable platform independent language for writing code, has to go and buy the Nintendo SDK (or whatever it’s called for the iEnvironment) and submit any application for review by the Standards Board so that it can appear in the official company store, even if it’s free.

Don’t get me wrong, I love svg and HTML5, and maybe in two or three years that’ll provide a competitor to Flash, but the idea that Apple is going to close itself off because HTML5 will be here someday doesn’t ring true.  They might as well say they’re not implementing Flash because the iPhone is waiting for the Semantic Web.

How would WOPR describe a recession? I suppose a little like this. There are collections of creative visualizations like Data Beautiful and theorists like Edward Tufte from whom we can draw rules for the visual display of information. But how do we use creative (visual) expression of knowledge to portray complex, deep and novel theoretical claims? If I have new scholarship and want to convey that new scholarship to my colleagues, is there a time when the best method of conveying that scholarship is non-narrative and non-textual? Or are visualizations better-suited for the purpose of illustration or pedagogy? Are they a spice that cannot stand on their own or can we make claims in multimedia that we cannot make using traditional linear text? And if so, what are the best examples of such claims?

I gravitate toward maps, both physical and conceptual. Flowcharts as slices of models also seem ripe with potential. And, of course, conceptualizations of “The Future” always contain animations and flashy visualizations that happen to be well-suited for portrayal in an episode of Star Trek, various attacks on the Death Star, or a Matthew Broderick vehicle from the 80s.

Years ago I’d mentioned to a friend how someone should create an image search based on images and not on phrases.  So I could put in a picture of a Ding Tripod and get all sorts of images that somehow shared visual similarities with Ding Tripods across the world (Even if the image name was J00001.jpg or someweirdmayanthing.png).  Just played around with Google’s Similar Images search, expecting that the folks who just handed 30 million books to Stanford had finally gotten it.  They haven’t.  Similar images to this:

are, according to Google Similar Image Search, a whole bunch of classic 2d maps.  Documentation is scarce, but it seems to have a text- or peer-collaborative- backend that doesn’t have anything to do with image analysis.  Oh well, on to Google Wave, which I hope will live up to all the hype.

Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and the Unknown Troper?  Yeah, maybe.

Because while you’ve been desperately trying to keep up with the mind-shattering connectedness of Facebook and Twitter, an entire culture based on shows, books and, well, tropes you’ve probably never heard of has sprung up, organized itself and managed to co-opt the very classics you’ve neglected to read.  Didn’t realize the Epic of Gilgamesh has elements of a Zombie Apocalypse in it or that the Anenid has anything in common with The Blues Brothers?  That’s because you don’t get it.  Somehow, while we weren’t looking, the Internet soup finally managed to get that Cthulhu, Dungeons and Dragons and All Purpose Cat Girl Nuku Nuku really do make up a common culture with Daoism, Lando Calrissian, 西游记, Final Fantasy, hip hop, the Lolrus and, well, everything.

It’s all tied together with a common understanding of comic book superhero powers, video game mechanics and memetic mashups.  Even the academics recognize that there’s something that ties together all these strange, seemingly dissimilar cultural artifacts.  Don’t know what a critical existence failure is or the tripartite model of videogame space?  Would you be able to recognize a 30 Xanatos Pile-Up?  If you’re sure by now that I’m making this up, put yourself in my shoes, I have to live here.