"Don't Panic"

Well, I suppose I'm a bit late to mention this, but better late than never.

Better late than never is probably what the BBC thought, too, when they finally got around to adapting the final three books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series to radio, with almost all of the same actors as the original cast (a couple had unfortunately died in the meantime) and the late Douglas Adams himself (or should that be "the late Adams Douglas Adams") providing the voice of one of the characters.

Astoundingly enough, we non-UK folks are much luckier this time than we were the last time around: the BBC is streaming each episode in 46 kilobit Real Audio for a whole week after it appears on the air; you can listen at the BBC's hitchhiker's Guide page. Astonishingly enough, there's even an option to listen in 5.1 surround (though I haven't given that a try yet; I plan to when I get home tonight).

The one problem is that today, Wednesday, is the last day on which one can listen to the first episode. I should have gotten around to it a little sooner, I guess.

My review of the first episode: terrific! While a few of the actors' voices may have changed a touch over the years, they are still recognizable as the same old characters we knew and loved. Arthur and Ford are achingly funny in their scene together; Zaphod and Trillian are a hoot (though it never does explain Trillian's sudden reappearance in the series after being absent for six episodes and supposedly married off to a galactic Bridge player or something), and Marvin...oh, good old Marvin the badly-misnamed android (he never was "paranoid," just really depressed). It's like a chance to meet old friends again. Even the late Peter Jones gets to put in an appearance as the Book, before his voice undergoes a change due to a "faulty vocal circuit."

Anyway, if you haven't yet heard it...don't miss out. I can hardly wait 'til tomorrow for the next one.

Free iPods Redux Squared

Wired.com has a followup story about the free iPod people. The gist is that they're getting swamped by demand, have sent 4,000 iPods out, and have 1,000 more in the queue. Including, I would expect, mine; the order status display for me on freeipods.com now says words to the effect of "order sent to vendor, waiting on product." The problem, they say, is that Apple just hasn't been able to crank them out fast enough for them to get them out to people in a timely manner. Well, I have nothing but patience. For a $300 mp3 player-cum-pocket hard drive, I can be very patient.

There's also a more general story about freeiPods.com in the PSU Collegian.

What About Bob Redux

I don't really have a whole lot to say about this particular story (Midwest Airlines cancels a flight after passenger finds Farsi writing in a magazine) that I haven't already said. It just underscores the point I made back then: the state of hysteria continues. Sigh.

CBS News: Caught between a blog and a hard place

Bloggers have often enjoyed keeping alive stories that the traditional media news outlets let pass them by. Sometimes this leads to the traditional media being forced to take notice. For example, Trent Lott's infamous line about having voted for Strom Thurmond's segregationist Presidential campaign was largely ignored by the media until blogs picked it up and ran with it—and in the furor that followed, Lott subsequently resigned as Senate Republican Leader.

Well, here we go again. Shortly after CBS news featured in a 60 Minutes II report some memos they'd gotten their hands upon, claiming that they were actual memos from the National Guard detailing Bush's poor service record, a blog entry came out pointing out a rather odd fact: these memos supposedly typed in August of 1973 use the proportional Times New Roman font, a font that wasn't invented until years later! This entry was immediately picked up by sites like BoingBoing, and of course a zillion other blogs.

For a couple of days, most of the "traditional" newsmedia ignored the story. Dan Rather vehemently defended the memos as having come from "solid sources" and having "no definitive evidence" that they were forgeries. Then the pro media, slow to rouse but quick to dig after being roused, got into the game and interesting things started turning up. For instance, it appears that CBS ignored some analysts' refusal to authenticate the documents, or else didn't actually show them the real documents when asking them to authenticate. Bloggers railed. The New York Times spoke to the original secretary for Colonel Killian, the man who supposedly wrote the memos, and produced the memorable headline—and I swear I'm not making this up—"Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says". A Republican congressman called for a Congressional investigation. William Safire called for an independent investigation as well. Rush Limbaugh had a field day.

Today, CBS claimed it was going to make a "special announcement" relating to the memos. First it claimed the announcement would be this morning, then noon, then 5 p.m. Finally, after missing all its deadlines, Andrew Heyward, the President of CBS News, made the following statement (according to the Drudge Report):

"We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would not have put them on television. There was a great deal of coroborating [sic] evidence from people in a position to know. Having said that, given all the questions about them, we believe we should redouble our efforts to answer those questions, so that's what we are doing."

Given how long it took them to produce that little scrap of prose, one can only imagine what must be going on behind CBS News's doors. Ah, to be a fly on that wall...

While many sources are being circumspect about the document's origins—saying that if they're not provably genuine, they haven't been proven false either—some experts are more willing to express some damning opinions.

Thomas Phinney, program manager for fonts for the Adobe company in Seattle, which helped to develop the modern Times New Roman font, [...] said "fairly extensive testing" had convinced him that the fonts and formatting used in the CBS documents could not have been produced by the most sophisticated IBM typewriters in use in 1972, including the Selectric and the Executive. He said the two systems used fonts of different widths.

If anyone should know, I would think he should. The article from which that quote was taken points out that there seem to be numerous factual errors in the memos as well, but really, talking about the scandal isn't meant to be the point of this post. If you want to find out more, you can check the hundreds of blog posts on the matter, or browse Google News's collection of articles on the subject. By the time I end up posting this article, there will probably be new developments that I didn't cover anyway. The roasting is only just beginning.

The thing I really wanted to say in this article goes back to Dan Rather's abrupt denial that there could be anything wrong with those documents, back when bloggers were the only ones carrying the story. Even if he just got sloppy in his fact-checking, the fact that he featured these obvious fakes in the story makes him look really bad—and admitting to uncertainty would make him look worse. So perhaps he figured he could brazen it out, just stick to his story and eventually the blogs would forget about it and the whole thing would blow over. Then the media got involved, and he had no choice but to stick to his story—and CBS News had no choice but to cover for him, even if some of Rather's colleagues might be a bit nervous about it.

What I have to wonder is how much of the decision to make that original denial stems from the problem that the traditional media seem to have in figuring out what to make of bloggers. It's like they have this great big blog-shaped blind spot keeping them from grasping the concept. "But they're not professional journalists!" one might imagine the staid newsmedia saying. And yet, they can't deny that blogs are extremely widely-read, even to the point of being included in the press corps at this year's political conventions.

This dichotomy invariably leads to the newsmedia cranking out patronizing "Awww, aren't they just so cute?" puff pieces like this New York Times article by Jennifer 8. Lee (Many bloggers were not impressed)—and subsequently being completely blindsided when bloggers call attention to hot news stories. One can only imagine how much worse they would take it when the blogs dare to call their own professional reportage into question. (As a Transformers fan, I can't help but imagine Megatron growling words to the effect of "Insolent worms! I will crush them!" here.) Perhaps this might explain CBS's original reaction.

And having made that reaction, they can only circle their wagons now that the other media have picked it up. "The documents might be fake, but...but the story is true! Really!"

Well, whatever. That story has passed into the hands of the other professional newsmedia now, and the Congress, and they're taking it places that bloggers couldn't. The bloggers will watch them, and blog on whatever happens next. And eventually there will be another big news story that is originated in a blog and catches the traditional newsmedia by surprise. And another, and another, ad infinitum. We're in the age of the blog now, where everybody who can bang a keyboard can have a voice. Journalism is never going to be the same, and the media are just going to have to learn to adapt.

---

Edit: In a brief footnote, it appears that the origin of the documents has been traced to a Kinko's "21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett," a man with axes to grind against President Bush; he's apparently made many allegations which have never been proven. The reader is left to draw his own conclusion.

Urban renewal in the City of Heroes

You may already have read my ePinions review of City of Heroes. If not, go ahead and read it now; I'm going to build upon it in this entry, but not repeat it, and talk about why, if you haven't already gotten into City of Heroes, now might just be the time to do so.

Finished? Cool.

That review was written back around the time of the game's early commercial release, after I had first gotten the opportunity to play. Now, a few dozen character levels and two free content updates later (well, okay, one and nine-tenths updates later; the second update hasn't actually gone live yet, but I'll get to that in a minute), my opinion of the game is even higher—not only has Cryptic Studios shown a remarkable level of willingness to fix what's obviously broken, they've improved and fixed some things I never realized were broken at all until they fixed them.

The first patch was largely a high-end content patch, with some cosmetic fixes for people at lower levels. Levels 41 to 50 were added to the game (characters had previously topped out at 40; now they get to go up to level 50), along with a new area for those higher-level characters to hunt, and some "instanced outdoor missions" to relieve the monotony of all the building crawls. Lower level folks could purchase costume changes at a tailor shop, and earn extra costume slots at levels 20, 30, and 40. Certain changes were made to some of the missions: adding "laboratory equipment" that could be smashed for a random chance at a power-up or power-down, or putting "prisons" in some enemy bases that would trap the unwary character trying to teleport out to the hospital for resurrection.

This was all fun stuff if you were levelled high enough to experience it, but it left a lot of lower level people wondering why they got passed over. The answer, game developer Jack "Statesman" Emmert said, was that they had actually expected more people to have concentrated on single characters and be in the level range where the content would be accessible. But still, the fact that people were having such a fun time playing multiple characters and taking a slower route to the top is actually a good thing, because it shows people are really enjoying the game. Emmert promised that the next update would have plenty of stuff for characters of all levels.

And he was right. Update 2 has been in beta on a special "training room" test server for a couple of weeks as people played it and located bugs for Cryptic to fix. This has let folks who care to (like me) experience what's in store for everyone once the patch is applied generally. And there is a Hulk-sized load of fun in store—so much stuff that I scarcely even know where to begin.

New content is one thing—there are new areas such as the Hollows for lower-level players, or the Shadow Shard for higher-level; there are also new "instanced outdoor" missions for people below level 40—but game mechanics are also getting an overhaul. The in-game chat system has been extended and expanded (and over-complicated, some critics claim, but it's easy enough to customize that you can perfectly duplicate the old system if you want), other interface bits (such as the character information screens) have been reorganized and clarified, some powers have been given different animations, and there are various other changes, most of which would take more explanation than it's worth to people who don't know anything about the game, and people who do know about the game would have heard already from reading the updates, so I won't go into most of them here. However, there are a couple that are particularly worthy of mention.

One of these is the new exemplar, or "reverse-sidekicking," system. The original "sidekick" system allows a higher level character to elevate a lower level character up to almost his own level in terms of fighting skill, defense, and hit points—so a level 10 sidekick can go toe-to-toe with a level 20 mob (MUD/MMORPG slang for "mobile NPC") and survive, if he has a level 20 mentor. This was touted as a unique solution for bridging the level gap that would arise between the characters of people with differing amounts of time to spend on the game—and to an extent, it was. If a friend of mine can only devote a few hours a week, and I devote thirty hours a week, our characters could soon be a dozen levels apart—but if I sidekick him, we can still go on all my missions together.

The problem is that this leaves the lower level character's missions largely unaccomplished, unless he does them by himself or with people his own level. This can lead to inconvenience down the road, because doing your own missions is the way you get contacts to sell you better goods and tell you where to find other contacts in other areas. If you gain too many levels on other people's missions, you may find yourself without contacts in particular areas. For instance, one of my characters has no contacts at all in the "King's Row" district of Paragon City—which can be a problem if she has missions that take her there and should need to power up with Inspirations (the City of Heroes equivalent of potions).

Enter the new Exemplar system. Exemplifying is sidekicking in reverse: instead of a higher-level character taking on a lower-level character as a sidekick and temporarily raising his level, now a lower-level character can take on a higher-level character as an exemplar and temporarily decrease the higher character's level to match his own. The higher-level character loses access to any powers he took after that level for as long as he is paired with the other character, and his fighting skill and hit points decrease to match. Instead of earning normal experience, the exemplified character earns 100% of XP toward debt reduction (instead of a 50/50 split between debt reduction and normal XP), or an equivalent amount of Influence (the City of Heroes version of money) if he has no XP debt. Thus, the circle is closed: a higher-level and a lower-level character can now adventure together all the time, as long as the higher-level one doesn't mind dropping back to the lower one's level half the time.

This also brings me to one of those problems that I didn't even know City of Heroes had until it was fixed. Now, when characters are sidekicked or exemplared to one another, the lower-level character's name appears indented below the higher-level character's. Thus, no more uncertainty over whether everyone is sidekicked before going into battle—and no doubts about who is paired up with whom. This was something that often frustrated me in the old version, but it had never occurred to me that it could be fixed in the interface.

Another change is the addition of the badge system. I have already touched upon this briefly in an earlier post, but let me go over it again. Badges are little trinkets that a character can earn for visiting particular places in Paragon City, or for certain accomplishments (reaching a multiple-of-10 level, completing a task force, taking a certain amount of total damage, paying off a certain amount of XP debt, collecting a certain number of badges, etc.). They're not really good for anything, except for displaying alternate titles under your name (though developers have suggested that some of them might be given certain game effects somewhere down the road), but they're fun to collect—sort of the City of Heroes version of orienteering.

Perhaps the change that people have been most anticipating, however, is the addition of capes. Once a character reaches level 20, he can take on a special mission to earn the right to add a cape to his costume. Similarly, at level 30 he can take on a mission to "upgrade his powers"—adding a glowing aura effect that surrounds his body. In both cases, these are little more than cosmetic changes, different options you can add at the costume shop like gloves or a hat. But all the players who feel their characters' costumes just aren't complete without a cape will finally be satisfied—not to mention all the mobs who've been saying, "Oh no, it's a cape!" will finally be right.

Capes were originally supposed to have been a part of the game on its original release, but the developers weren't satisfied with how they looked and decided to leave them for a later update to give them more time to work on the animation. That extra care they took certainly shows in how well the capes ended up looking. They blow in the breeze (apparently heroes generate their own breeze, since they blow indoors, too), they swirl and swing as characters move—in short, they're one of the best-looking things about the game (and auras don't look so bad either). The only problem is that they have clipping issues with characters who have bulky bodies, long hair, or things (like tails) sticking out their backs.Hopefully somewhere down the road Cryptic will find a way to fix that.

As I said earlier, the second update has not actually gone live yet. It's been in beta for the last couple of weeks on the testing server. Players who cared to create new characters there or copy pre-existing characters over could play in the new system, learn about what's been changed and added, and sniff out bugs or coding issues that were still in the code. And Cryptic has been remarkably responsive, coming out with a new patch every couple of days fixing things that people noticed or complained about. Badge checkpoints that don't give badges, information overlaps that cause people using badge titles not to display their character information, problems with the way the new chat interface worked—all these and others were addressed, and quite promptly, too.

And those of us who bought the game are getting all this extra content for free. Sure, there are charge-for expansions (City of Villains) down the road, but nobody can complain that Cryptic and its publisher NCSoft haven't added a whole lot of value to what we originally bought.

And for those of you who haven't started yet, now might be an especially good time to get into the game. Recently, Statesman posted a mysterious announcement:

Fellow heroes, disturbing information has come to light. Thanks to the hard work at the Federal Bureau of Super Powered Affairs and the Portal Corporation, we have discovered an odd energy signature throughout Paragon City. Researchers believe that this aetheric energy appears to be building towards a climax at some point in the near future. We believe that this will occur at some point over the next several days, but the authorities are not yet sure. All heroes should be on the look out for anything strange in the city. Be on guard; we have reason to believe that this bodes ill for our metropolis.

The consensus among City of Heroes players is that this probably means that there's going to be a special "live event" coming up to kick off the new update, perhaps this weekend. This would be the first such event since the alien invasion that marked the end of the City of Heroes beta test period. All reports from the people who were around for that were that it was a heck of a lot of fun, and everyone's looking forward to seeing what Cryptic is going to throw at us now.

So, if you're in the USA, you can go to the store and buy the box, which comes with a free month; if you're somewhere else, you can purchase a CD key and download the software (about 800 megabytes) on-line (which would also include that free month). It's a great game, has a lot of good players in it, and is some of the most fun you can have on-line for $15 a month.

Oh, and if you decide to come to the Victory server, say hi to Purramedic.

Edit: Corrected references to NCSoft, the game's publisher, to refer instead to Cryptic, the game's studio. I always get those two mixed up...

Krypto Locks meet their Kryptonite

In the "good old days" of bicycling, bicyclists had to protect their bikes with flimsy chains and cables that a determined thief with a bolt-cutter could bypass in just a few seconds. Many bikes were stolen.

But then came the hardened-steel U-shaped Krypto Lock, a lock that laughed at puny bolt-cutters. It would take either liquid nitrogen or construction equipment to get it to come off—neither of which your typical bicycle thief was likely to have at his disposal. They were immediately widely-adopted, and not just for bicycles, either; I've heard that they are often used by protesters to lock themselves to buildings or heavy equipment to make it harder for the cops to haul them away.

Unfortunately, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link—and a lock, no matter how tough, is only as strong as its latch mechanism. A discussion from a bicycling web forum has shown up, linked on BoingBoing, demonstrating that at least certain models of Krypto Lock can be opened with a common Bic ball-point pen. And it's not just words alone—there are two Quicktime movies (here and here) actually demonstrating it being done.

The movies are amazing. All it takes is one of those standard white plastic ball-point pens that you can buy in packs of 10 for $1, with the plug at one end of the tube taken out. Stick the tube in the keyhole, wiggle it around, and click, open it comes.

Looks like it may be time for bikers to get another lock.

Free iPods Redux

In an update to an old post, I finally got enough referrals for my free iPod to be able to place my order. Even though after I got my last referral they said they would need up to a week to verify that all the referrals were valid, they must have been working at record speed, because I was able to place my order the next day. It is currently listed on their webpage as in "processing" status.

Of course, I recognize that it may be weeks before I receive the gadget; to save money, they'll want to wait until they have a large batch to send and ship them all out at once. But the important thing is, they are sending it. (Or at least they say they are.) I'll post again when I have the iPod in my hot little hands.

As a side note, I still have only three "confirmed" referrals for my flatscreen TV set (and I need eight). I'm still looking for referrals via my conga line; please read my original post and see if the deal works for you.

The Red Badge of Controversy

You've probably noticed I haven't been posting anything here lately. The reason for this is that work has gotten really busy, and I haven't had the time to spare from work at work, and playing City of Heroes at home, to say much.

However, in the interest of not losing all of my readership, I've made the time to bang out a brief entry on an issue that alternately amuses and annoys me.

In the forthcoming second content update to City of Heroes, currently undergoing testing on a special open beta server, one of the major additions is a system of badges. Not unlike scouting merit badges, you can get these badges for various accomplishments such as subduing certain numbers of particular kinds of baddies, earning a particular amount of influence, and so on—or for visiting particular places on the game map. Each of these badges has a name and a brief description, telling a bit of history or trivia about the location or some hero associated with it. In addition to showing up on a list of badges, a badge's title can be made to appear under your character's name as a secondary character title.

One of the badges is the "Patriot" badge—originally placed at the top of the dome on Atlas City Hall, next to the flag, and the badge said something about how you've stood beside Old Glory to earn this badge. In today's political climate, and given the international patronage of City of Heroes (even in countries where it's not "officially" released, it can still be purchased and downloaded over the Internet), you should see the problem coming from a mile away. In the coh.com web board discussions that followed, many non-American gamers (and some of the more liberal contingent of American gamers) immediately denounced this as forcing American values of patriotism on all players, even if they were native to some other country. Most American gamers (and some non-American gamers), accepted this with a shrug since it was part of the game's setting. If you're playing a character who lives in America, in a game set in America, about the American institution of the superhero, isn't it reasonable to expect that patriotism might be associated with the American flag?

Apparently not; in the most recent patch to the test server, NCSoft changed the location and the description of the Patriot badge. It is now near a statue inside City Hall, and commemorates some superheroine who, after saving the world from a rogue comet, was granted citizenship in every country in the world. Leaving aside all other issues associated with the change for a moment, this new form of the Patriot badge doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Not only do many countries (such as the United States) have mutually exclusive citizenship requirements, but patriotism doesn't have a whole lot to do with citizenship in a country; it has to do with allegiance to that one country and its set of values, over all others. I'll grant it's possible to be patriotic to more than one country if their values are particularly closely aligned, especially if you hold dual citizenship. But to be patriotic toward all countries on earth at the same time? Including the ones that are at war with each other, or are guilty of human rights violations (at the same time as the ones trying to stop those violations)? That truly is a superheroic feat...of schizophrenia.

Now, in both its old and its new incarnations, the title of the badge is simply "Patriot". Even if the description referred to Old Glory, it was still possible for a character to wear the badge and mark himself as a "Patriot" of wherever it was he came from—be it the USA, Canada, England, Germany, etc. And before the change, nobody was forcing them to get the badge; in fact, as it was placed on the roof of the building, it was far enough out of the way that it couldn't be snagged by accident. But a lot of people didn't see it that way, and so NCSoft made the change. And in so doing, they opened up a few big cans of worms—not the least of which being that the change was made on September 10th, and thus first noticed on the inauspicious date of September 11th.

Reactions posted on the COH boards' "official Patriot badge change thread" ranged all across the spectrum—from satisfied to moderately pleased to moderately annoyed to incensed. And naturally, on the discussion in the coh.com web boards, it was the incensed people who made the loudest noise. What was a bit more unexpected was that the people who were pleased with the change—that is, the ones who had the least reason to whine about any of it—started whining right back at the incensed people. Apparently in their eyes Americans' support of their flag equated to support of the American government, which was doing things they didn't like. Negative connotations of the word "patriot" in current American politics were brought up, including the PATRIOT Act. People complained about what America currently "stands for." In short, it turned into a big mess, and it went on for quite some time. It's like the world's slowest train wreck; even Godwinning didn't seem to stop it, and it finally took a moderator locking it to bring the invective to a close. It reminds me of the old maxim that the viciousness of politics varies inversely with the amount that's at stake; surely an argument over a computer game update that isn't even out of beta yet has to be way down there on the lower end of the "stake" scale.

However, all is not quite as it seems. According to a response from Statesman (the game's chief developer), he had always felt that the Patriot badge should be better-placed, and instead there should be a "Freedom" badge next to the flag, the better to reflect American values. This was why the Patriot badge was moved. However, the new artwork for the Freedom badge was not yet ready, and that's why it hasn't been placed yet. Most of the people who were whining are now resting a little easier.

I can't help but feel that there are still problems on the horizon for this, though. Even with the Freedom badge, something that provides any positive recognition to the American flag whatsoever will probably not work all that well for some of the complaining crowd (who have since moved on to complaining that the badge given out for subduing the City of Heroes version of the Mafia has the colors of the Italian flag on it). It's a strange dichotomy: these people are willing to play a game from an American company, written by American programmers, run on American servers, in an American setting—but let there be any hint of US-centrism and they're all over it like ugly on a Troll.

Oh well. I was formerly pretty annoyed by the change, not so much for reasons of patriotism but because it seemed like NCSoft was "wimping out." But Statesman's explanation cleared it up for me, and I look forward to being able to get my Freedom badge, whenever it goes in.

Expect an entry from me on the new City of Heroes update sometime soon.

Record year for record company...huh?

Amid all the hoopla about piracy threatening the content industries, all the uproar about needing to make peer-to-peer sharing or even "inciting" peer-to-peer sharing a crime, all the suing of the music industry's own customers...music company BMI turns around and reports its best fiscal year ever. What? How can this be? Look, guys, either your very existence is threatened by the Evil Scourge of Peer-to-Peer or it isn't, make up your minds——you can't have it both ways!

The favorite record industry response is, "Well, just imagine how good it could have been without peer-to-peer," but I find it hard to believe an industry that's really "under threat" can be making more money every year, in record amounts. What if peer-to-peer was responsible for the growth? As I've mentioned in my entry prior to this one, many groups have found that giving their content away for free on the Internet is a sure-fire way to sell more of it.

Why is hardly anyone calling the RIAA's figures about the piracy threat into question? Why are we letting them get away with chipping away at our freedoms on a pretext that may not even be valid?

If you haven't yet, there's no better time than now for you to read Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. It may be one of the most important books you ever read.

Street performers, bowls, plants...and the gaming industry?

Today, someone on the Ebook Community mailing list was asking about publishing ebooks in serial format, with a possible view toward subscription down the road. It's an interesting idea, and it could work—in theory. Certainly there have been plenty of serial writing projects on the Internet; I've belonged to some of them myself.

Probably the most successful was the Superguy listserv, a humorous superhero fiction mailing list which at its height had hundreds of subscribers and dozens of episodic posts every month. The complete archives are still available to be searched and read via links on that site, by the way, and it's well worth the time. There's a lot of drek in there, but there's certainly enough good stuff to throw Sturgeon's Law off a bit. It's mostly dead now, alas; I wish I knew what could be done to make it live again. I've halfway considered plugging it in Google AdWords just to see if it picks up any interest.

There were other such groups, too—most notably alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest, alt.comics.lnh, etc.—but if I dwell on past glories, I'll never get to the point I want to make here, and I've got a ways to go yet. The point is the feasibility of serial publishing for money, not just for love, and I have a couple of examples to cover.

Almost exactly four years ago, back in late 2000, I happened to be hanging around SF writer Elizabeth Moon's SFFnet newsgroup at the point she and a few other SFF regulars got all-over excited about the Street Performer Protocol. The Street Performer Protocol, which I shall henceforth call SPP to save on some typing, was proposed in a white paper by John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier as an alternative means of content financing in the Internet age—sort of a modern-day version of the old Renaissance system of patronage.

The theory went that since, thanks to computers and the Internet, a completed work can be passed around ad infinitum without the author ever being compensated for his work, the author should endeavor to set a goal for how much money he wants to make out of the work—and then make that amount of money out of it before it is made available in its entirety. Anything he happened to make out of it after that would be a pleasant bonus.

The idea was that an author would create a complete work—be it a novel, a record album, a TV series, whatever. He would put the work in escrow with some reliable agency, or at least have such an agency certify that it was complete (so he wouldn't be selling a work that might never be delivered). Then he would chop that work into X+1 pieces, post the first piece to the Internet (or make it available by whatever means; the Internet is simply the most convenient), and set out a "hat" with the proviso, "Pay me whatever you want; when I get (1/X * my goal) amount of money, I'll post the next piece." Some people would chip in, others would not; either way, each piece that's released has been paid for, so it's free for anyone. And then the next bit would be paid for and released, and the next, and so on, until the last piece is published. Then, once it's all published, anyone can do whatever they want with it, because the author has already made the money he set out to make. (The white paper suggests putting the work in the public domain; a Creative Commons license would probably be more realistic today.) It gets a little more complicated than that, but follow the above link to find out more.

Getting back to Elizabeth Moon, she and others were quite enthusiastic about the idea of serial tip-jar publishing; Moon had some story notes that she'd never gotten around to publishing, nor did she think they were publishable by normal methods. So they set up the Storyteller's Bowl based on SPP principles. It was a very nice-looking website, with clean, professional design, a little illustration of a Middle-Eastern storyteller with carpet and bowl, a FAQ, and a set of writer's guidelines. "Only professional writers with a track record are eligible at this time," they said. One imagines Mrs. Moon delivering this line in stern tones, perhaps peering over the rim of half-moon spectacles as she speaks. (I have no idea if she actually owns half-moon spectacles, but she probably should.)

However, was is the operative word. As you can see by looking at the archive.org listing, it was only ever updated once—and if you go to storytellersbowl.com now, you'll just find a placeholder. After gamely hanging around unwanted for several years, its registration has finally expired. The storytellers' enthusiasm didn't last long enough to put out the bowl.

Why? I asked that question back in 2001, on the Storyteller's Bowl SFF newsgroup. There were several obvious reasons, of course: people got too busy, nobody wanted to be the first to bell the cat...but probably the biggest one was, as author Lawrence Watt-Evans put it,

Stephen King's The Plant sort of undercut the idea — it got all this hype, and then he DIDN'T FINISH IT, which has not been good for the consumer confidence factor.

Ah, yes, The Plant—Stephen King's brainstorm after his short story "Riding the Bullet" did so well as an ebook. The fly in the ointment was that King was too used to thinking in terms of paper books and just couldn't seem to get his head around the differences. This led to problems.

Back in December of 2002, I wrote an email message to the Ebook Community neatly summarizing those problems in response to someone else's inquiry. It went like this:

Oh, god. The Plant. Don't get me started.

Stephen King couldn't have made his project more ridiculous if he'd been intentionally trying to give ebooks a high-profile failure to make up for the success of "Riding the Bullet". The Plant expressly ignored several key ways ebooks differ from treebooks, for no other real reason than King thought they should work that way.

Download of different formats of the same chapter was counted as separate, different downloads and expected to be compensated as such. What?! A download is not a non-renewable resource...and if someone downloaded one format and just did the conversion himself (as he is entitled to by fair use), he'd have the same result and save his money. King compared the practice of multiple download to saying "Since I have the hardcover, you should give me the paperback free." That was totally missing the point.

"Success," and thus continuation of the project was based on what percentage of the downloads people paid for. This set an impossibly high goal, and it's not any wonder that sooner or later he failed to meet it. What should have been done was set a specific numerical or monetary goal, not unlike the Street Performer Protocol, and continue once that was met.

By tying "success" to percentage of download paid for, King also set it up so that anyone with a grudge against him or his readers could ensure that the project was not "successful," simply by writing a script to download the episodes a zillion times without paying for them. That's why on-line polls are so mistrusted—they're so easy to rig. Any script kiddie could have done the same thing with King.

In the end, the percentage of paid downloads fell below King's "success" bar, and he called the project a "failure" and terminated it unfinished—thus putting a black mark on the face of epubbing that may take a while to clean off. But even so, it's worth noting King took in hundreds of thousands of dollars for only writing half a book. Maybe that's not much by the standards of a megasuccess like King, but most other authors would have been dancing in the streets if one of their books made them even one hundred grand.

And so King shelved the book, and it cast a pall over the entire ebook industry. If such a famous author couldn't "successfully" sell a serial ebook, then the market must just not be "ready" yet. ($463,832 profit. I wish I could "fail" like that!) It was not the only reason the Storyteller's Bowl remained empty, but it was probably the biggest one.

Now it's four years later, and ironically, it's turning out that flat-out giving one's works away for free on the Internet is usually a sure-fire way to sell more of them in print. You don't have to look far for examples: Baen, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, and countless others are slinging ebooks every which way and selling print versions hand over fist. Forget selling on the installment plan, give it away and you'll sell even more.

This points out the fact that the SPP plan still has a few problems, even putting aside the shameful example of The Plant. Here are the ones that I see.

Writers (and other artists) don't want to limit their profit. Now, granted, most books these days sell fairly poorly; it's the rare writer indeed who can make his living entirely from the pen. But still, writers and artists don't want to think, "I can get this much...and that's it." They want to think about multiple printings, reprint rights down the road, and so on and so forth. (Heck, that's why our copyright is now umpteen zillion years long—all the big corporations saying, "Oh, please, won't someone think of the artists?") Creative types want to earn as much as they can, and continue earning it for as long as they can. (And really, don't we all?) And this leads into...

Free works better. Much as we e-nthusiasts would like to think otherwise, most people just don't want ebooks yet—or at least, they don't want to pay money for them. Certainly they don't want to pay hardcover prices for them. And yet, they'll certainly take them when they come free—and if they like them enough, they'll buy them in print, and more by the same author. As mentioned above, this has been shown multiple times; some Baen authors like Mercedes Lackey have even seen a notable increase in their non-Baen sales after giving away books free. Why, then, would we want to sell something they don't want, and sell it in pieces to boot? And this, in turn, leads to the realization that...

Consumers want convenience and conformity. Getting people to try something new and different is hard. Getting people to try something new and different and hard to understand is even harder than that. Can you imagine the puzzled looks on peoples' faces? "You want me to pay for something that isn't even available yet. And you don't even have a set price? My ever getting to see it at all depends on other schmucks chipping in? Are you crazy or something?" Also, the people who read Baen snippets (preview fragments of the first 25% of a novel that the authors throw out before Webscriptions is ready) and Webscriptions (which publishes new books divided into three monthly chunks) notwithstanding, I think most people would prefer to be able to read the whole work at once and not have to wait on an update schedule—especially if the update schedule is irregular and may not even happen at all if not enough people chip in.

That being said, I actually do think there is a place for the SPP in modern-day publishing—just not in fiction publishing. The SPP has to be applied to a medium where authors are more realistic (or pessimistic), there's a reason to buy e- instead of tree-books, and consumers are accustomed to buying piecemeal.

As you may already have guessed, I'm talking about the modern roleplaying game market. Let me hit those problems again and show why I think that in the RPG market they might be opportunities.

Gaming writers are used to limited earnings. It's sad to say, but it's true; in the game industry, five cents per word is considered to be good money if you can get it. Multiple printings? Reprints? In today's RPG hobby, depleted as it has been by loss of interest, game consoles, collectible card games, massively multiplayer games, any or all of the above (take your pick), a title that sells even one or two thousand copies is considered to be a smash hit. I suspect that the SPP could offer at least some gaming writers a chance to earn more than they would ordinarily make, not less. Especially considering that...

Many RPG sourcebooks are now published as PDF-only. In an industry where a "best-seller" only sells a couple of thousand copies, sales of the "mid-list" will barely cover the costs of even a tiny print run—and increasingly, they may not even cover that. If the theoretical ideal of print-on-demand were available, it would be the best way to market these low-volume books—but it isn't, so PDF is the next best thing. A PDF displaces the printing costs onto the buyer, so the seller has to sell fewer e-copies to break even on publishing costs. In some cases, renowned gaming writers may even sell PDFs directly to the gaming public without ever seeing a publisher at all (other than the website that sells the PDFs). Needless to say, these aren't typically given away free, since if they were then there wouldn't be anything left to sell. And gamers are used to buying stuff published in PDF form, since they're just going to print it out anyway. And they're also used to the way that...

RPGs are published piecemeal anyway. How many books make up D&D 3(.5th)rd Edition's core rules? Three—player's handbook, DM's guide, monster manual. You don't need all of them to play the game (especially if someone else is game-mastering), but they each provide content that expands upon and works with the ones that came before. And they were originally published a month or so apart, so for the first couple months, anyone who actually wanted to play would be making do with only part of it. And how many books were in the old White Wolf World of Darkness line? How many GURPS books were there? And right when gamers finally have all of them, out pops a new edition and they have to buy even more! While there have been games that were complete in and of themselves (White Wolf's Adventure! comes to mind), they're much more the exception than the rule. And even games that have been beautifully complete (Champions 4th ed. and Nobilis 2nd ed. for example) have had supplements published. Gamers are used to buying things in pieces.

It would be interesting if some gaming writer were to try this, as an experiment. Write a game, or a sourcebook, or what-have-you. Put a Creative Commons and/or OGL license on it, but keep it as close to public domain as you're comfortable with. (Perhaps one of the licenses that allows unlimited noncommercial use, since that would allow eventual complete publication elsewhere on the rare off-chance that someone might be interested.)

Break it into a few chunks, post the first chunk, then put out a tip jar (the new DropCash fundraising system from PayPal seems like it would be ideal, as it gives would-be donors graphic representation of how close they are to goal) and declare you'll post the next when you hit a certain goal. (Be sure and set a realistic goal—but then, gaming writers tend to be well aware of how many copies and how much they make per book, so should be able to come up with a good estimate.) It would probably be best to make sure that each segment is at least useful on its own, so people don't feel gypped at having to wait for something else to come out to make it useful. A good possibility would be a sourcebook for a pre-existing system such as D20 or World of Darkness; each chunk could cover a different region of a particular world, city, what-have-you.

And then...wait and see how quickly it earns its way to the goal. When it does reach the goal, leave everything available and the tip jar out; the work has earned out and now it's free. Anything that folks want to kick in afterward (and they will kick in, as more of them find and make use of the content) is gravy.

Will it work? I don't know, but I'd like to think so. It seems likely to me that it would, as long as the goals were realistic and the writing good. Granted, I've never written any gaming material myself, just hung out with folks who have, so I'm not exactly an expert in the field. Still, I'm positive it would have a better chance than Stephen King's bass-ackward The Plant plan—and just look how successful that was.

Opening the garage door to Fair Use

Found on BoingBoing: One of the more publicized abuses of the DMCA is the case of the garage door opener company, the Chamberlain Group, that sued another company, Skylink Technologies, for manufacturing a door opener that acted as a sort of "universal remote," using a manufacturer-implemented backdoor that bypassed the door manufacturer's "rolling code" security system.

Well, an appeals court has just affirmed the summary judgment against Chamberlain by a lower court. Finding the wording of the DMCA a trifle ambiguous, the court took a look at its legislative history to get a better handle on what the framers meant to do with it; thus, the opinion (html version or PDF file) contains some quite good discussion of just what the DMCA is and is not meant to cover. I'm not sure that I entirely followed it, and I really hope that Lawrence Lessig will discuss and boil it down for us lay-people, but the gist of it seems to be that the DMCA doesn't create a new kind of property right, it just enhances the protections given to ordinary kinds of property. In my opinion, one of the most important bits of it is this paragraph:

Chamberlain's proposed construction would allow copyright owners to prohibit exclusively fair uses even in the absence of any feared foul use. It would therefore allow any copyright owner, through a combination of contractual terms and technological measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual copyrighted work-or even selected copies of that copyrighted work. Again, this implication contradicts § 1201(c)(1) directly. Copyright law itself authorizes the public to make certain uses of copyrighted materials. Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software. What the law authorizes, Chamberlain cannot revoke.

I think that this opinion is going to be quoted in subsequent cases for quite some time to come. At first I thought that the DMCA might have been substantially defanged in terms of preventing fair use—except that I noticed that the opinion does refer to and agree with a case entitled Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes , 111 F. Supp. 2d 294, 319 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) which seems to have found against deCSS, but deCSS (and its descendants) have the substantial noninfringing purpose of allowing fair-use access to DVDs—and also, some copying is fair use.

The facts here differ greatly from those in Reimerdes. [...] The court found that the defendant had violated 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2)(A) because DeCSS had only one purpose: to decrypt CSS. Id. at 319, 346."

And then I noticed that Seth Finkelstein points out that the decision really doesn't do as much as it seems to at first glance; Ernest Miller also takes it frame by frame.

Oh well; as I've said before, I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I don't understand all the implications of these things. But checking legal weblogs for commentary seems to be a good place to start.