There are a few things which struck my mind this time:

The Biblical Theme Park

Walking though the old city among masses of tourists from all over the globe you almost expect some disneyfied savior to leap out of the stones that have seen it all. Whether it’s the themed fast food stalls (holy bagel anyone?) or the high-heeled mothers, aunts and older sisters of bar mitzvah boys posing in front of the wailing wall, there’s an eerie sense of cultural commodification.

The funny thing though is that there’s nothing wrong with it at all. There’s still tons of people praying and doing their authentic cultural thing the masses are so eager to experience. But as the snapshot happy tourists press onwards through the Armenian, Jewish, Muslim and Christian quarters (where’s the pirate quarter?) consumer culture seems like the most natural and logical extension of the Abrahamic cradle.

Apart from the Holy Disneyland, the city is busy upping its image as a modern bustling metropolis (less than 800,000 inhabitants) with the silver light train zipping from hill to hill, sprouting skyscrapers and of course the Chords Bridge.

P.s. the title of this blog post might be misleading. There’s nothing about Jerusalem at night in here but at least it was written in Jerusalem at night and changing blog post titles after the fact is a bad habit of mine, so I won’t try hard to come up with an effortless looking title at this hour…

P.p.s. here’s a little sound recording from the old city. Feel free to listen or download and use in your projects

The Default Setting

• authors need money to “buy time” to write
• it’s difficult for most authors to survive
• “12,000 euro gives me 4-5 months to live” – Andreas Maier, novelist
• “Writing books is a difficult way to earn a living” – Katharina Hacke, novelist
• “Luckily, my wife earns enough” – Marcus Olof (?), poet

MOAR Numbers:

• average income under 20,000 EUR per year in established market
• newcomers earn under 15,000 EUR per year
• top 10 authors in Germany earn 41 % of all income (!)
• 3/4 of authors say that if they had success, they did marketing themselves
• 96 % of publishers say that “our authors should manage their own website + marketing”

Summary:

“Authors mainly want to write and be read, because if they wanted to earn tons of money they’d have picked a different job.”

P.S.: While there are huge differences between countries (in Germany less than 1% of all book sales are ebooks, in America it’s about 20 %!), I think the broader trends here are valid on an international basis.

also: this

Not only did these characters teach me the first meaningful sentences of English outside of an education curriculum, they fed my imagination, humor and curiosity, as well.

I still remember the many days I went to school, looking for that friend who had already solved that brain-wrecking puzzle in Indiana Jones. Yes, when you were stuck back then with an adventure game, you were really stuck. You couldn’t just quickly google “how do I get the mummy up on the roof”. You had to figure it out on your own or ask someone who had already cracked it.

For some reason, adventure games have since then grown out of fashion. In 2000 I remember playing Grim Fandango, and while the 3D graphic was stunning, walking a character around in a three-dimensional environment seemed very different from the old-school method of trying to match the right verb or inventory item with the right point on the screen.

Luckily, there’s Amanita Design, a small independent game developing studio based in Czech Republic.

Their 2009 Machinarium was very much in the tradition of old adventure games, full of pointing and clicking, whimsical characters and hauntingly beautiful 2D graphics, and introduced many younger gamers to this simple but powerful gaming experience.

This year, on April 19th, 2012, Amanita returned with an adventure game that is even weirder, funnier and more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen: Botanicula.

The story is hard to describe. You are playing a strange bunch of tree creatures: a stick, an acorn-like thing, a fly, a creature with a hat, and a mushroom. The tree they live on is haunted by big black spider-like abominations that literally suck the life-juices out of their home.

Doesn’t sound compelling?

Well…

It’s all in the way graphics, soundtrack, puzzles and character animations work together. Rarely have I seen a more immersive adventure game. The soundtrack is not just some background muzak to fill the silence, it’s the product of Czech band Dva and minutely matches everything that happens in the game, down to the smallest click. Moving your mouse-pointer (or finger, in the touch version) through the undergrowth makes little tinkling sounds, when the creatures solve a riddle, layer after layer is seamlessly added to the music until you’re carried away in sonic bliss.

The puzzles are great, with huge variety, and there’s lots of mini-games to discover, too.

5 stars!

In short: If you make a photo of an apple on a chair the printer will print: “looks like there’s an apple (past expiry date) on a dented Ikea chair.”

If it feels like there’s a pixie sitting inside the mechanism, carefully describing the picture, it’s because there is one! Or, to be more precise, hundreds and thousands of them:

The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete. The developer sets the guidelines for each task and designs the interface for the worker to submit their results. The developer also sets the price they’re willing to pay for the successful completion of each task. An approval and reputation system ensures that workers are incented to deliver acceptable results.

By the way, if you’re wondering about the name:

The name Mechanical Turk comes from “The Turk,” a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen. It toured Europe, beating the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was later revealed that this “machine” was not an automaton at all, but was in fact a chess master hidden in a special compartment controlling its operations.(wiki)

It’s exactly that moment of surprise which makes the descriptive camera so eerie. Usually, machines and gadgets in our life pretend to be human (“talking” friendly, reacting with soothing sounds and colorful graphics), but in this case we are dealing with humans pretending to be machines.

Imagine each time you google something, it’s not being parsed by an algorithm but actually gets sent to a Chinese work camp where millions of “click workers” then pore over your query.

Once this technology becomes more wide-spread how can we be sure that when we click  a button in a software, it doesn’t have direct effects on the lives of human beings somewhere around the planet?

Maybe even the PHP code which makes this article possible is not really a software, but instead once I hit publish an army of college dropouts working at 0.01 cent per hour cobble together the raw HTML? Can we really be sure?

It reminds me of that Monkey Dust episode:

To summarize, one of the major points that McLuhan seems to be making is that the invention of print is closely connected to a psychological development within man, namely his detribalization and the isolation of a particular way of looking at the world which could be classified as linear and systematical, in the sense of successively removing man from the world in the formation of a new sense of “objectivity”.

In order to understand this better, he takes us on a tour through medieval reading and writing culture which differed significantly from the 20th century outlook on literature but might be experiencing a revival today in the major shift occurring in publishing and reading, as I’d like to show in the following paragraphs.

1. From Isolation To Integration Of The Senses

“If a technology is introduced either from within or from without a culture, and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses, the ratio among all of our senses is altered. We no longer feel the same, nor do our eyes and ears and other senses remain the same.”

McLuhan argues that due to the invention and proliferation of print, the visual sense of man has been (over)stressed to an extent where i becomes isolated. This can be seen in an extreme in the example of speed reading courses where students are taught to disconnect the eyes scanning the text from the inner verbalization, thus speeding up the information intake.

Compared to most modern writing in books and newspapers, in medieval times the writing in manuscripts looked very different, almost as if it wasn’t meant to be read as much as meditated upon.

In addition to the very visceral style of the letters, these manuscripts were full of colorful illustrations and marginalia.

One could argue now that they seem far more visual than our modern blocks of immaculate black & white paragraphs, but it’s true only in a superficial sense. In fact, if we study the way people produced and read these manuscripts, we find that these works were not generated through isolation of the visual but portrayed an integration with all the other senses. These manuscripts were immersive in the truest sense of the word, inviting the reader to participate with heart, mind, body and soul, as it were.

The ebook and the way electronic texts are being published show signs of returning to a more holistic harmony of the senses, at least potentially:

• On an e-reader, the fonts, font-size, paragraph spacing are not “set in stone”. They can be adjusted fluidly to the mood and capacity of the reader in any given moment
• ebooks can contain not just illustrations which can be explored by tapping or clicking, they can also contain videos and sometimes have a “text-to-speech” function turning the written words into an electronic spoken performance.
• by linking and crossreferencing an ebook to the whole body of human knowledge in form of the Internet the isolation of traditional print has become malleable

2. Authorship

“[T]he Middle Ages for various reasons and from various causes did not possess the concept of ‘authorship’ in exactly the same significance as we have it now. Much of the prestige and glamour with which we moderns invest the term, and which makes us look upon an author who has succeeded in getting a book published as having progressed a stage nearer to becoming a great man, must be a recent accretion. The indifference of medieval scholars to the precise identity of the authors whose books they studied is undeniable. The writers themselves, on the other hand, did not always trouble to ‘quote’ what they took from other books or to indicate where they took it from; they were diffident about signing even what was clearly their own in an unambiguous and unmistakable manner.”

It seems that now in the 21st century we are returning to a state where the author no longer overshadows his work, but where, potentially, the content counts first.

For the last few decades, books have been increasingly connected to their authors. Often, books were only published because their author was a public figure, however marginal. The interest in the person of the author came first, and the text itself was only read because of what it revealed about its author. The very essence of book marketing hinged on the person of the author, promoting the work through talkshows, book signings, etc.This is still very common today, but it seems the significance of authors has reached a climax and is challenged by new modes of electronic publishing

If people like a picture, a song, or an article on the Internet, it is often completely irrelevant who produced it, except for the fact that knowing the source will lead to more and similar works. The blogging platform Tumblr is a good example of this. Something gets reblogged, not necessarily because its author is well-known, but because the image/song/text speaks to the blogger and she wants to proliferate her own experience/opinion/feeling through the medium of the discovered artifact.

Also, in the field of independent book publishing we see a trend where authors need to become ever more creative and inventive to bring their works to a public who doesn’t know or care about the author while potentially being very interested in their works.

The growing disconnection between author and artifact leads to another important issue: copyrights. The burning debates at the moment, as I see them, are not so much about the morality of pirating but rather about the changing entitlement of authors and artists. In a way, it’s already to late for arguments. The fact that we are having these discussions only shows that author and artifact have already lost the cemented relation they enjoyed only a few decades ago.

3. Sharing

“To copy and circulate another man’s book might be regarded as a meritorious action in the age of manuscript; in the age of print, such action results in law suits and damages.”

Social Media seems to return us to this more tribal state where “pirating” (in a strict sense, even posting a picture on Facebook or Pinterest is piracy) is not viewn as a perpetration, but as a sign of respect.

It’s also said that if there’d been copyright laws as we have the today in the time of Gutenberg, the printing revolution would never have happened.

The current copyright wars can be understood from three different camps:

• artists (and their representatives) who have been popular pre-Internet and demand compensation for the unauthorized reproduction of their works online
• media consumers who refuse to pay for something that is also available for free
• artists that have grown in and through the Internet who realize that only because people circulate their works can they gain and maintain an audience.

We shall see in the following years whether the first group (which is also the older one) will be able to withstand the growing demand and insight of the second two.

But again, the fact that we’re discussing this at such a large scale at the moment only shows that the old mode isn’t working anymore.

While artists and their representatives turn into policemen, prosecuting consumers with the help of Internet providers and governments, a new global tribe is growing which is based on an economy of sharing, substituting the system of direct compensation with more indirect and subtle approaches that make for both an accelerated proliferation of works of art and encourage the production of more.

copic on cardboard,2012, AK

“When you’re not paying for it you’re the product.”

Companies like Facebook (and others) live from the fact that people happily open their hearts, minds and psychological pockets to pour it all into little input forms without thinking about consequences.

Without your data, in other words, Facebook or Google+ wouldn’t be anything but a skeleton made out of zeroes and ones. We, the users, are like the mythical Elohim blowing the Spirit into the nose of a piece of clay, thus fabricating the first human. Less poetically, Facebook is like a meagrinder: your life goes in on one side, dollars come out of the other.

They are eager about each detail of our lives: our age, sexual preferences, where we spend our holidays, when we are awake, when we are asleep, which authors and perfume brands we like. Facebook is like that creepy college wallflower obsessing about the tiniest particles of our personal lives, only that it couldn’t really care less about you as a person. In terms of data, we’re only interesting in masses. Quantification is the magic word, here.

So it’s not surprising that companies like Facebook are very territorial about their (previously our) data. So territorial, in fact, that it amounts almost to an impossibility to delete or remove the data once feed to its twirly tentacles.

Personally, once I found out that they not only kept track of everything I ever did there, but also were so nice not to give me a “clear cache” or “delete history” button, I had to do something.

I spent days googling for ways to perform said “clear cache” operation, to no avail – that is, I found tons of advice, scripts, bookmarklets, but they were all outdated, although some of them were just weeks old!

Having said that, there are means and ways short of manually deleting everything. For example you can use iMacros extension for Facebook and record certain procedures in the browser and then loop them, but don’t expect any of the ready-made scripts you find online to work. It’s all a bit buggy, but it works.

Here’s a script that gets rid of all “likes” for example. Only works when going to Activity Log  and selecting Likes:

SET !ERRORIGNORE YES

TAG POS=1 TYPE=I ATTR=CLASS:mrs<SP>defaultIcon<SP>customimg<SP>img<SP>sp_ezhf7z<SP>sx_ac036f
TAG POS=1 TYPE=SPAN ATTR=TXT:Unlike…
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:BUTTON ATTR=NAME:ok&&VALUE:Unlike

By the way, that part in bold might be profile-specific, in fact I’m pretty sure it is.

P.S.: I’m aware that some people will just say: If you don’t like FB, then just don’t use it. It’s true, but unfortunately it’s a bit more complicated because if I deleted my account I’d lose fb pages I administrate not just for myself but also for others and as far as I’m concerned there’s no way to delete a Facebook profile and transfer proprietary pages to a different user. Tell me if I’m wrong.

Amazon says:

Free promotions will start at approximately 12:00 AM Pacific Standard Time and end at approximately 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time. Depending on system latencies, it may take a few minutes to several hours for the free promotion to end.

Each time I switch a publication into promo-mode for a certain day, the brain racking starts. The combination of three things gives me a headache as predictable as a Swiss wrist watch:

• 10 hours time difference from PST to my timezone
• the latency: a few hours give and take doesn’t make it easy to time a launch
• the horror of AM / PM

The last one is probably the most annoying. Every time I find myself asking: If I set a free promo for a certain date, does it start at midnight or noon?

Doing some idle googling, er… duckduckgo’ing… I found the following statement by the Time and Frequency Division of the NIST (an agency of the Department of Commerce):

[T]he terms 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. are wrong and should not be used.To illustrate this, consider that “a.m” and “p.m.” are abbreviations for “ante meridiem” and “post meridiem.” They mean “before noon” and “after noon,” respectively. Noon is neither before or after noon; it is simply noon. Therefore, neither the “a.m.” nor “p.m.” designation is correct. On the other hand, midnight is both 12 hours before noon and 12 hours after noon. Therefore, either 12 a.m. or 12 p.m. could work as a designation for midnight, but both would be ambiguous as to the date intended.

Thanks Jeff!