Usually I try to provide information, analysis and criticism whenever I post, but I think this one’s worth posting all on its own:
“The California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage,” ruling that “domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage.”
It’s no mission accomplished, but it’s a strong step forward for social progress and queer rights.
2 Comments | 
American Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged: california, gay marriage | 
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Posted by Gordon Levine
The good news: the divorce rate in America is falling. From its peak at 5.8 divorces per 1000 people in 1983, the divorce rate has gradually fallen to its most recent recorded statistic at 3.6 per 1000 in 2005.
The bad news: 66% of marriages don’t survive to see their 25th anniversary. You might think that statistic has to do with the mortality rate, but no: given that the American median marriage age is 26, a couple celebrating their 25th anniversary is likely to be in their early fifties — young enough that death hasn’t caught up yet.
With people likely to live dramatically longer this century, the way we think of marriage will have to change. No more “’til death do us part.” Soon enough, we’ll have to face the truth: that nothing — not even marriage — lasts forever.
1 Comment | Love and sex | Tagged: death, divorce, marriage | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
“Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was great.”
You heard it a lot when it came out in 2004. You’ve heard it a lot recently, since the sequel came out last Friday. You’ve probably thought it a few times yourself — like, “Harold and Kumar was great.”
Not to step on your toes, but what you probably meant was that Harold and Kumar was awesome. And it was! Not only did it do everything right, like Freakshow and the cheetah scene, it went above and beyond the call of duty to include Neil Patrick Harris. There’s almost nothing to improve on. It was just that good.
Great, though — that’s saying something else. The Godfather (part 1) was great. Catcher in the Rye was great. Hell, Great Expectations was great. Great works of fiction are timeless classics, and they aren’t easy to spot when they’ve just come out. Mostly, history decides what’s great and isn’t.
Not this time, though. I’m calling it early: Harold and Kumar, like Arthur and Lancelot before them, will be remembered as truly great.
2 Comments | Critical Theory, Popular Media | Tagged: harold and kumar go to white castle, neil patrick harris, teleology, teleonomy, king arthur, thomas malory, the holy grail | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
Apple, Steam and Radiohead: what do they have in common? In the last few years, they’ve proved that digital distribution can be profitable for artists and publishers. The iTunes Store, for example, sells more music than anywhere else in America, including Wal-Mart, that parasitic vine of the retail tree.
What caught my attention about that Apple press release (above) is its language. Take a look at the first paragraph:
“Apple today announced that the iTunes Store surpassed Wal-Mart to become the number one music retailer in the US [...] With over 50 million customers, iTunes has sold over four billion songs and features the world’s largest music catalog.”
What Apple isn’t mentioning — or hasn’t realized — is that it hasn’t sold anything. In fact, the iTunes Store isn’t really a store at all — not in the traditional sense. Neither is Steam or Amazon MP3. Nothing is purchased, because nothing changes hands. What you’re paying for is access to their content library; what Apple and Amazon and Steam are providing is a service.
What that means is — for the first time in a long time — we’re paying to access recorded music, not to own it.
3 Comments | Critical Theory, Web Community | Tagged: amazon, apple, digital distribution, itunes, mp3s, music, radiohead, steam, valve | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
From a Center for Economic and Policy Research report:
“In the absence of government standards, almost one in four Americans have no paid vacation and no paid holidays. According to government survey data, the average worker in the private sector in the United States receives only about nine days of paid vacation and about six paid holidays per year.”
That paragraph alone is chock-full of reasons to be angry at how America treats its working folks. To get the full effect, check out this chart of how industrialized nations stack up in terms of vacation time. We all know that France gives its workers a lot more time off than we do, but how about Brazil? South Africa? Hell, even Vietnam mandates ten days’ vacation pay for full-time workers.
Now, the big question: how many days off does America require companies to provide?
6 Comments | American Politics | Tagged: america, CEPR, france, vacation, workers rights | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
Unless you often browse online for kids’ games, you’re unlikely to know about Bananagram, a Scrabble knock-off my mother bought the family for Christmas. She buys a new game every year, and usually it’s a card-game — something easy to learn, easy to play, and low-stress. This year, we didn’t get a card-game. We got Bananagram.
I’ll say this for Bananagram: it’s worth posting about. Not because it’s good, though. Bananagram earned a post because it’s a perfect example of what can go wrong when developers don’t think games through.
12 Comments | Game Theory | Tagged: bananagram, bananarisk, party game, scrabble, tile game | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
From a 1982 Arpanet post made just after the invention of the internet emoticon:
Because you can’t see the person who is sending you electronic mail you are sometimes uncertain whether they are serious or joking. Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for annotating one’s messages to overcome this problem. If you turn your head sideways to look at the three characters :-) they look sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a message that says “Have you stopped beating your wife?:-)” you know they are joking. If they say “I need to talk to you :-(“, be prepared for trouble.
I’m going to break a personal rule and give you just one link to chew on this post: the recovered 1982 Carnegie-Melon University chat thread in which emoticons were invented. There was a reason the text smiley was invented, and it wasn’t because some twelve-year-old couldn’t figure out a better way to express himself. It was created because a pHD-holding researcher at Carnegie-Melon realized that text without bracketing has an incredibly hard time communicating emotion, even between friends and colleagues.
6 Comments | Semiotics | Tagged: emoticons, Semiotics, the internet | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
(I don’t speak German; the title is what FreeTranslation.com came up with for “The Uncanny and Video Games.”)
Here’s the problem with human character models in modern video games: animators are just good enough to get themselves into trouble. Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, calls it the uncanny valley: the point at which things aren’t quite human and aren’t quite alien. Anything stuck in the valley tends to freak the hell out of us.
9 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Final Fantasy, Freud, Lost Odyssey, Mario, Masahiro Mori, video games | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
With a ten million subscribers, World of Warcraft is the undisputed king of the Massively Multiplayer Online jungle. Between sales and subscription fees, it grosses almost $1.5 billion a year and, as of today, has well over 50% market share in the MMORPG business. The game’s so addictive it causes not-infrequent divorces and forms the basis for hilarious satire.
Why is WoW so addictive, though?
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: blizzard, video games, world of warcraft | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
Tim Gunn, former Chair of Fashion Design at Parsons (The New School for Design), recently said some incredibly humane things about fashion on the Daily Show. The best part of the interview (starting around 3:30 in the clip) was Gunn putting Fashion in its place:
“Fashion — I mean, I’m the first to encapsulate this realistically — nobody needs it. We need clothes, but do we need fashion? No. Fashion, when it’s good, it comes out of a context that’s societal, cultural, historic and economic and political, so it’s of a time and a place.”
Those ten seconds of interview probably made Gunn a class traitor to rigid fashionistas around the world. Was Gunn really taking fashion down a few notches, though? Or was he reinforcing something those same fashionistas have been saying for years: that Fashion is Art?
7 Comments | Fashion Studies, Semiotics | Tagged: Fashion, jon stewart, the daily show, tim gunn | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
Genghis Philip
Gordon Levine