Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer is the new YA novel that all my adult lady bookworm friends are reading.  At my office four women have already read it and two have even finished the two sequels, New Moon and Eclipse, and are anxiously awaiting for August 2nd to bring them Breaking Dawn.  I am more than halfway done with Twilight, but I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t be reading it.  This book has a disturbing philosophical motif that isn’t suited for males.  To put it bluntly guys, so far this story comes across as a manifesto against sex and pro all those qualities women wished us men had but most of us don’t.  Is this the beginning of a radical movement?

I feel like a spy reading a classified document meant for her eyes only.  Can women really read our thoughts from looking at our eyes?  Are women’s secret desire to have their true love stay all night in bed with them without trying a damn thing?  Is attention, talk and protection all what women really want from men?  If Twilight is a big time fantasy for girls, then boys, all those porn fantasies you spend every waking moment on, are on such a vastly different wavelength from the object of your desires that I think maybe you ought read Twilight, just to learn what the enemy is thinking while you are picturing them without their clothes.  They are picturing you in clothes.  Nice clothes.  Outfits you don’t take off.

Strangely enough Twilight is about vampires and werewolves, which you’d think would be full of great action and thrilling violence, but no.  These vampires all belong to my sister’s Please and Thank You Club.  Like I said, I haven’t finished with the first book, but so far killing and stakes through the heart are absent.  This is a far cry from Van Helsing, and it’s definitely not Buffy and Spike bringing down a house.

If J. K. Rowling had used a female as her lead character instead of Harry, would the Hermione Granger series have had as many readers, and would the working of the magic unfolded as it did for a male point of view?  Is Stephenie Meyer different, a writer revealing feminine secrets unlike most female writers who play along with male fantasies, or does her explosive success represent a large segment that’s pro chastity?

I have to admit that Meyer’s take on vampirism is quite cool, if intellectual, but I’ve got to wonder if it’s just one giant metaphor for male desire, where Meyer ties lust and sex to violence and death.  Edward Cullen becomes the ultimate beautiful male that must control his instinct to kill, which for the average guy is the instinct to get laid.  Now I could be completely off base here, and Meyer will eventually come around to the traditional values of sex and violence that all us guys enjoy and love, but I’m worried how far she will delay gratification.

This is a fun way to review a book.  I can’t spoil the ending because I don’t know it.  I can tell you the book is gripping, full of tension between Bella and Edward, and that women love this story.  I’m not used to reading teen girl fantasies, so it may not be as much fun as seeing into the girl’s locker room, but it might be like having a secret microphone planted there.

Jim

Blogging, WordPress and the Future

I’ve been blogging for awhile.  I started with LiveJournal, and then moved to WordPress on my hosted site, and finally to WordPress.com.  I like the convenience of WordPress.com maintaining everything, and I’m developing a wish-list of desired features I hope they will roll out in the near future.

First, let’s think about blogging in general.  The basic idea is to write a post and get comments.  Older posts are pushed down and stored away, and the general method used to find these older stories is either by categories, search box or calendar grouping.  It’s pretty effective for what it does, but I wonder if other methods might be developed to organize the overall site and expand the theoretically limits of what it means to blog.  WordPress is constantly adding new widgets, so their structure is built around adding features, so this post is going to suggest some features I want and imagine where I’d like blogging to evolve in the future.

Paid For Feature Modules

I don’t know if I can expect all my desired features for free, but what if each module was a paid add-on or part of a plus service?  I have no idea how WordPress makes its money.  It’s a great free service that doesn’t appear to use ads and what few add-on features they do sell don’t look like big revenue generators.

Some of the features I’m wishing for could be part of a $49.95/year plus package.  I’ve invested a lot of time in WordPress, so I don’t mind paying.  I don’t want them to go bust – I want WordPress to be around for generations to come.  I assume WordPress wants to maintain their current marketing plan of offering a free service, but I can picture my blogging needs expanding, and I imagine so do others.

Right now there are too many Web 2.0 services.  I can share my thoughts on WordPress, my photos on Picasa, computer work on Zoho.com, friendships on Facebook.com, genealogy on Ancestry.com, my book lists on LibraryThing.com, and so on. 

What I’d like is one place to present the digital me.  MySpace and Facebook want that place to be their services, but I’m not happy with those sites.  They are too restricting.  What I want is one place to combine all the features, and for now I’m thinking my blogging home at WordPress.com is the place to start.  I have no idea if the people who produce WordPress want to be such an enterprise, but I’m guessing my desires are just part of an evolutionary process on the web and somebody will offer them.

The Digital Me 

Let’s think of a blog as an analog for a person’s life.  Right now blogs model people with the diary format.  Before computers, memoirs and autobiographies were two ways to convey a person’s life.  However, those formats depend on linear progress and some random discovery.  When you meet someone at a party you don’t get to know them in a start at the beginning, end at the end, fashion.  Generally you start talking about a subject, and this is covered by blogging with categories.  But if you’ve ever been to a blog site of someone you like to read and they have a long list of categories it’s not very inviting.  And if their current three posts are all boring then you’ll get the wrong idea, even if they wrote a brilliant post just before that.

Science fiction has for years imagined artificial beings or speculated on machines recording people’s minds and converting them into computer beings in artificial worlds.  I’m thinking a blog could be something like that – a download of your personality.  But you need a face to represent the whole of your being.

Table of Contents

Magazines use their covers and table of contents to promote their top stories, hoping an eye catching headline will get you to buy a whole magazine and read the rest of the issue.  However, magazines are not good structures to model a person’s complete life, but the TOC could be a good format to use for an introduction, or your face.  Home pages on blogs take you to the latest post.  I’m wondering if WordPress could create a Table of Contents page to use as the default home page, something that would combine the features of the About page and table of contents, to welcome blog visitors and help bloggers introduce themselves, giving guests a bigger picture of what you are like.  Also, let this page have more layout options, use a 2-3 column HTML table to organize the structure, and allow the maximum customization. 

Since the word categories is already used, have an organizing unit called “Projects” to be a super-group above categories.  I like the word “projects” because I like to think of organizing my life into projects.  Marketing people might come up with a better word.  Maybe tie it in with major personality traits.   Here’s an example of what I mean.  For the Table of Contents page have several user-created Topics or Projects called Family, Friends, Work, Hobbies, Travel, and Reviews.  Under Reviews I might have category listings for Audio Books, Books, Movies, Television Shows, Music, etc.  Under Family I might have categories for Parents, Wife, Kids, Genealogy, etc.  Then allow each Topic/Project to have an icon or small photo in the layout, so visitors at a glance can see how the blog writer organizes his or her life.

TimeLine

Another fun format to add would be the TimeLine – something to help people remember when and were things happened.  Since people have imprecise memories, you’d have to have a Date field that could handle  years, months, seasons, and days.  I don’t think hours and seconds would be needed.  (Fall 1949, 12/7/82, January 1971, 1963.)  Users could enter birthdays for family, and then school years and schools.  That way people could quickly know how old they were in a during a particular school year, or what years they worked as a bag boy.  Bloggers could enter dates for when they met people, got jobs, saw concerts, had children, went on vacations, etc.  Additional fun features would be hyperlinks to web sites that show the TV schedules, top news, best selling books, big movies, etc. for each year to help prompt memories.

Lists

I like keeping a list of the books I’ve read, my favorites, the ones I own, favorite songs, my CD library, favorite movies, DVDs, movies seen, etc.  Lots of people are list makers, and so having a list making module would be awful cool.  Like the TimeLine module above, this would force WordPress to get into the database business, which moves them more into the Zoho.com type service.  WordPress could offer both custom database applications and do-it-yourself kits.

Genealogy

Blogs are about people.  I use my blog to help remember things.  One of the things I’ve always meant to get into is genealogy – but not in a big way.  What would be amusing for blogging is to enter enough information so it links to other genealogy sites and to other bloggers, so when you meet people you can glance at their ancestry and maybe check if you’re related.  If this linkage grew eventually we’d be able to say to our blogs, “show a family blogging tree.”

Who Is Your Blog For?

When you’re typing away at your blog posts do you do it for friends, strangers, or yourself?  I call my blog Auxiliary Memory because I’m getting more forgetful all the time.  I really would like to use my blog as a supplemental brain.  If WordPress had the security, I’d even like to save private information on my blog.  Not bank account numbers, but just data only I would want to see when I’m trying to remember something, maybe something personal like address books, Christmas card lists, work and home To-Do lists, etc.  I’d also like to keep my last will and testament and parting thoughts, so when I die, especially unexpected, I can leave some last messages.

Now do you see what I mean when I think of a blog as a digital analog of myself?  Right now blogs are a collection basket for thoughts, but it could collect other personal items, like photographs.

Photos and Time and Place

There are plenty of online photo galleries for people to share their pictures, but I’d like one integrated into WordPress.  Why separate thoughts from images.  I’d like to tie photographs to the TimeLine and to the Genealogy.  Currently we enter posts by today’s date and time, but I’d like to be offered a field that would let me enter posts for past dates and time, that way I could organize my photographs chronologically, and work to remember the past.

It’s quite obvious what would happen if you could link photos to genealogies.  I’d also like to link photos to streets and cities, and I would like to connect to other people to share photos linked by time and place.  I moved around a lot when I was a kid.  Imagine putting all my photos from Maine Avenue when I lived at Homestead Air Force Base from 1962-63 into the system and someday getting a message from long lost friends who went to Air Base Elementary with me?

Photo Rotation and Linking

Right now we get one photo for our header to represent our personality.  It would be great to draw from a pool, so on some pages visitors would see images from a random rotation from the pool of personal or stock photos and for other pages, specific photos to go with the content of the post.

This would be a nightmare to roll out for WordPress.  It’s much easier to manage the system when there’s a limited number of templates for users to build their sites.  For this to be practical, WordPress needs to designate certain sized photographs – so all header photos would be the same size for a particular template, as they do now, but offer you the system to switch photos on the fly.  When you create a new post you’d have the opportunity to link to a photo pool folder or link to an individual photo.  This wouldn’t require a major programming change, and WordPress would sell a lot more space.  Of course, it would be nice to link to Flash videos and animations too.

I’m Sure You Get My Point By Now

By now you should see the trend.  I supposed with XML and web services many of these features could originate on companies outside of WordPress, or allow these features to work across all blogging sites.  I love the idea of OpenID and that needs to be expanded.  Selecting a blogging service like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal is like selecting a nationality, but we shouldn’t have language barriers to keep us from communicating across borders.

It may even be possible that various blogging services could work together so you’d have memberships on more than one service and combine the results.  I see people trying to do this now but the results are disjointed, like they have multiple personalities, or they want to have separate public identities.  I hate when I leave a reply on a Blogger site and it wants to send people to my Google identity rather than my WordPress identity.  My FaceBook page should just have a widget that displays my WordPress blog instead of trying to duplicate a blogging feature.

Has anyone thought about the ramifications for blogging for decades?  Or generations?  Permanent storage needs to be addressed for historical purposes.  I always like to ask people, “What would the world be like if Jesus had a blog and we could read it today.”  Whose blog would you want to read from history?  File and data formats are going to have to become standard if they are going to be readable in a thousand years.  And if you spend a lifetime crafting your blog so it represents who you are, do you want it to die just because your body can’t go on?

These are just some idle thoughts on my part.  Start thinking about what blogs could really become.  Just wait a few years for when WordPress rolls out its AI widget that allows you to program a talking personality to go with your blog.  All it’s personality will be based on your past blog entries.  Eventually, we’ll be able to talk to our AI and it will automatically create our posts just from interviewing us.

Jim

Going Paperless 6 – Zinio

I started this series about Going Paperless back in February and I’m slowly progressing towards my goal.  My initial plan was to give up paper editions of newspapers and magazines, and in theory replace them with editions for the Kindle or on audio for my iPod, but Zinio electronic publishing was also recommended to me, and that turned out to be third path to going without paper.  I haven’t renewed any of my paper magazines yet, and I’m still reading paper editions because many subs haven’t expired.  As they expire I’ve got to find a paperless solution, thus giving me the incentive to subscribe to Zinio editions.

Even though I haven’t yet subscribed to a magazine through Zinio, I have gotten a number of free subs and issues.  Today I discovered a major change in how Zinio delivers magazines that makes a vast improvement over their old solution.  The previous method centered around a software reader installed on your machine, and magazines were saved on your hard drive, in the “library” as the program calls it.  The new method is entirely web based, and what’s amazing, the online reader is better than the fat client!  Web software programs are making quantum leaps in quality these days – it’s just mind blowing compared to just two years ago.

One thing I hated about the old reader was how it dealt with photographs.  Photographs didn’t handle magnification like text.  Text got bigger and stayed sharp, but magnified photos just got pixilated and jaggy.  If you want to see a photo in a real magazine better you hold it up closer to your face and you can see more details.  Now, with the online version, you can magnify the photo almost like you have Photoshop.  Sure images will eventually deteriorate, but it’s good for three levels of blow-up.  This is great for reading magazines like Popular Photography.

And there’s more!  The online version is quicker and easier to scoot around within a page.  Onscreen reading is greatly improved.  The online program tries to be intuitive and guess what you want, so it has fewer controls.  It takes a little getting used to, but I attuned to it fast.  In full screen one click magnifies to 200%, another full click de-magnifies back to 100%.  At 200% a hold-down click allows you to grab the page and slide it around.  There’s a -/+ magnifier icon for 100% 200% 400% and 800% magnifications, so only mouse clicking is needed for quick reading and page turning, saving you trips to the top menu.  On my 22″ LCD monitor I can read the magazine in full two-page view with no scrolling, but it’s easy and quick to magnified and read in large print.

Zinio isn’t perfect yet.  You have to read at the computer, but net reading has gotten me used to that.  What I’ve always wanted is a way to build a personal periodicals library that also had a search feature.  Now this would work in two ways.  I want full-text word search on all the magazines I own in my digital library.  At the next level I’d want a full-text word search for all magazines published and be offered a chance to buy a magazine with an article I needed.

I like having an online library.  Not only do I not have to save my paper copies, but I don’t even have to clutter up my computer with digital copies.  Boy, I wish I had my years of back issues of Sky & Telescope and Astronomy Magazine stored away in the Zinio library – I’d gain enough shelf-space for a hundred books.

Since I started my going paperless quest I’ve learned some limitations about being perfectly paperless.  Magazines like F&SF and other short story periodicals are something I’m going to read in a chair, and they are fine to get on the Kindle.  I didn’t like Time on the Kindle.  Magazines that I want to save like National Geographic or Sky & Telescope might justify their tree killing ways if I do keep them for years.  I feel books are worth their ecological paper costs if we keep them for decades or centuries, and the same would be true for magazines we want to preserve.  And since I want to sell a story to F&SF someday, I want to subscribe to the paper copy, just in case I ever get a story printed.  I can read most of my favorite magazines online with no trouble.  Something like Popular Science which has very busy layout, would be easier to read as a Zinio edition.

Zinio still doesn’t offer all the magazines I subscribe to, nor is the pricing on most journals what I think electronic editions should cost.  If the publisher can skip printing, postage and distribution costs, then the electronic subscription should be significantly cheaper than buying paper, and in most cases it’s not.  12 issues of Popular Mechanics for $7.99 is A-OK.  12 issues of PC World for $19.97 means I read the free web version.  And I’m not even offered magazines like Scientific American, Discover, Seed, Entertainment Weekly, Wired, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and most of my regular reading.

Strangely enough, I can find many of my favorite magazines online offering their content for free – this makes me wonder if Zinio might be undersold by free web content.  For companies like Zinio to succeed will require a new way of thinking about how magazines are priced. 

I figure the NetFlix or Rhapsody Music model of pricing would be a better system.  I pay $10 a month to each of those services and have unlimited access to their entire libraries.  Rhapsody Music provides subscription music to nearly everything that’s for sale on CD for one monthly fee and I can listen all day long.  NetFlix will send me one movie at a time from their vast library or let me watch a growing list of films on my computer any time for their monthly fee.  Zinio, and other companies should offer a similar service for online magazines.

Some of my magazines have expired like The New Yorker, PC Magazine, PC World and Maximum PC, Time and Linux Journal.  I don’t know if I should say this, but free web content has filled the need completely over these paper editions.  I’m tempted to get The New Yorker on Audible.com, but I don’t miss the others.

My subscription is about to end for Entertainment Weekly, a zine my wife and I both read and enjoy.  Susie is not on the path to paperless living, and I don’t want to renew.  Much of EW’s content is online, but reading their website is like running a gauntlet of ads, and EW paginates the hell out of their stories forcing you to see page after pages of the same crappy ads.  And their RSS feeds aren’t much help either.  The paper copy is the easiest of their distribution methods to read.  If it was available for a reasonable price, Entertainment Weekly would be perfect to get on Zinio.  Because it’s not on Zinio and I want to stick to my paperless philosophy, it means I have to give up reading EW.

Jim

SnagFilms Film Widget

I’m testing out the new service called SnagFilms.com.

[clearspring_widget title=”SnagFilms Film Widget” wid=”4837b4759c19ccae” pid=”488224dbbd70beed” width=”300″ height=”250″ domain=”widgets.clearspring.com”]

This is just a test of a new online service that promotes documentary films that I heard about on the Audible.com edition of the Wall Street Journal.  Watching the films at their site is slick, but I’m not sure about the snagging part.  Basically, you watch a film, and if you like it and want to promote it on your blog you hit the snag button and SnagFilms logs into your blogging site, creates a post and puts a graphic advertising the film and allows you to tag it with a little comment.

I would prefer how I put YouTube videos online, using commands within WordPress that embeds the video player in my post.  SnagFilms’ method is more viral, pushing people to their site.  But it doesn’t allow me to write my blog and introduce the video.  I’m writing this after the fact, so the initial RSS feed will just be icon for the video.  In the future I won’t use the snag feature and just post a link.

The current selection of documentary films at SnagFilms is small, but high quality.  There’s a review process, so you can’t just upload your masterpiece like at YouTube.  The video I’m testing is from PBS and narrated by Brad Pitt.  It’s a fascinating story about how China works to be environmental.  The film quality has been excellent so far, and the aspect ratio is HD.  Annoyingly, the second line of the subtitles for the foreign speakers and people identification is covered up, at least for this film – so parts are meaningless because all the interviews with Chinese speakers are missing half the translations.  Of course, they are in beta.

SnagFilms makes its money by playing a commercial before the film starts, and between each video segment, and the segments are about 15-25 minutes long.  You can also order a DVD from the site, and part of the money goes to the film maker.

I love documentaries, but most documentaries do not get wide distribution.  A few famous ones are shown in the movie theaters, and some of the rest get spots on TV, but many are only seen in art houses or on college campuses.  SnagFilms hopes to make documentaries more easy to see, which is a good thing.  Hulu.com, another video distrubtion site, has some documentaries, but mostly TV shows.  I’m getting to like watching video online because I can put one up in a window and watch while I’m working at my desk paying bills or other light duties.  Both of these sites have nice size videos that are smooth playing and have good sound.

Online videos are good for sharing with other people, and great for catching a missed episode of a favorite show.  They are starting to get good enough to bypass the old TV set.  Damn, I bet we all end up like the people in Wall-E – fat slobs reclining 24×7 in floating lounge chairs with our face always in a video screen.

Jim

PickensPlan.com

If you haven’t been to PickensPlan.com yet, please stop by and view the short video.  T. Boone Pickens, the big oil man has big plans for wind power.  This video should make you feel better about the current oil crisis.  Just the thinking is a step in the right direction.

pickensplan

Mr. Pickens’ plan is pretty straight forward and sounds both practical and doable.  It’s not a complete solution, but it would dramatically reduce the demand for oil and in a reasonable amount of time.  We need more billionaires out there thinking up ideas like this one.

What’s amazing is there is so many people coming up with great ideas that I wonder why people do not feel more positive about the future.  Just look at what the last two days of piddling good news has done for the stock market.  It only takes positive thinking to create a bull market.  Sure, we shouldn’t live in fantasy land and ignore our problems and failures.  I can’t see why the nightly news can’t present at least a 50-50 mix of good and bad news, instead of a long stream of negatives with a token upbeat story at the end.

If the middle of America could be made into a giant wind farm, why can’t the deserts be turned into giant solar energy farms?  I expect the next twenty-five years to be exciting and transformational.  If every oil billionaire comes up with a substitute for oil we should be energy independent in no time.

Jim