June 2008 Archives

In high school, my circle of nerd friends would pass around withered copies of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and dream of using our skillz to outwit The Man. Instead we sat around in the server room, eating Sno-Balls and upgrading the school’s copy of Adobe PageMill, but in our minds, we were just biding our time.

(The de facto leader of our gang once did score one coup, though, by using his expertise to subvert the school’s rule against TV/movies in students’ dorm rooms. He snuck into the downstairs utility closet, split the dorm’s cable TV signal, and wired the split through to unused terminals on the RJ45 Ethernet jack in his room. This remains one of the coolest tricks I’ve ever seen.)

The ultimate geek experience, we mused, would be to attend one of 2600’s biennial HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conferences at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. Oh, to rub elbows with the greats of cyberspace counterculture! To be understood by our fellow villains! What rapture!

AP English finals being what they are, we never found the time to fulfill our dreams, so I don’t know firsthand what HOPE conferences were like when I was in high school. I suspect they were different than we imagined down in the library basement.

I bet, too, that the HOPE of the ’90s bore little resemblance to the present-day HOPE, which takes place in a world where the notion of “hacking” has been softened and legitimized. The list of talks for “The Last HOPE,” July 18-20 here in NYC, features household names like Steven Levy of Newsweek and Mythbusters’ Adam Savage. I doubt their publicists would have encouraged them to show up at a “hackers conference” ten years ago.

The Levy and Savage sessions appear alongside more cautionary embraces of the mainstream, e.g., “From a Black Hat to a Black Suit: How to Climb the Corporate Security Ladder Without Losing Your Soul”:

You want it all. You can see the brass ring and you want to jump for it. But you’re scared. You don’t want to put on a suit and watch your soul shrivel like the spot price on RAM. There is another way. In this session, you will learn: why you want to do this to yourself, how to get the first job (which will suck), how to turn the first job into the next job (while still having fun), how to get the top job (sooner than you thought you could), and how to do it all without feeling like a corporate whore. You want to hack the planet? You’ve got to start somewhere.

Organizers say HOPE 2008 the final HOPE because the Hotel Pennsylvania is set to be torn down (although preservation efforts are being made, presumably by people who never had to spent a night there). Regardless of venue, it is time for HOPE to go. The hacker revolution is over—not because the hackers lost, but rather because they have become so integrated into tech culture. Almost every aspect of independent enterprise in the technology sphere could fall under the umbrella of “hacking,” and indeed, as you browse the HOPE schedule, you see that pretty much everything does.

My pack of office-chair rebels would have been disappointed to see hackerdom lose its “us against the world” edge. My slightly older self is gratified that a community has so successfully advanced the causes of free information, personal liberty, and individual innovation that the black-hat stereotype has become an exception to the norm. HOPE is dead; keep hope alive.

“Dare to be naïve.”¹

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Have a buckyball. I found out about Buckminster Fuller in high-school chemistry class, when we studied the carbon molecules known as fullerenes. My science teacher spoke highly of Fuller’s geodesic dome and pimped the inventor/philosopher/architect as one of the 20th Century’s great thinkers. I was intrigued, but when I researched Fuller, I found surprisingly little substance to match the general surfeit of awe.

More recently, I enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert’s look at Fuller in The New Yorker as it crystallized my vague sense of a disconnect between Fuller’s famed dynamism and his practical output. (Kolbert notes that even the geodesic dome, easily Fuller’s most prominent legacy, turned out to be an impractical piece of junk.)

The promo above for the Whitney Museum’s Buckminster Fuller Exhibit, which opened yesterday, blandly hypes Fuller as an innovator “with ideas way ahead of his time.” Nonsense. Buckminster Fuller was a man very much of his time, a fantastical poster child of the World’s Fair utopias that big industry and magical technology were supposed to create. He fascinates me not because he was some great visionary of the future but rather because so little of what this successful, brilliant person invented and foretold actually came to pass—despite, to this day, legions of willing believers. You can check out the Whitney exhibit through Sept. 21.

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If you can make it here… It’s been a while since I featured a DIY project in this space. In honor of this week’s Twisted: A Balloonamentary screenings—where I learned for the first time how to make a balloon dog—here’s a how-to for a basic balloon puppy dog. You can get a balloon-twisting kit from the same site or at your local toy store/magic shop/etc. Note: Don’t get just the balloons. You’ll need a pump, too! Those little balloons are really hard to blow up the old-fashioned way.

Also, Instructables has a Top 10 Summer Instructables list up, and while not all the projects are suitable for city living (e.g.,flying a kite), I like the Tetris ice cubes and heat-blocking curtains.

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1. According to Bucky. ↑

My wife, who designs stuffed animals, passed along this item to me with the note, “Just because you seemed desperate for something to write about,” as if the creature below (“Geeky Ninja”) were somehow ill-suited to my site:

Obvious bias notwithstanding¹, I think the field of collectible plush toys is more interesting right now than the stagnating vinyl toy scene, although the tiresome marketing tricks are mostly the same. Pro: “Ninjacon” is not a real thing, so it’s not a clumsy plug. Con: According to Tomopop, you can only get it at this weekend’s Wizard World convention in Chicago.

The good news is that the toy’s designer, Shawnimals, is bringing their Ninja line to a Nintendo DS game this October. The game has gotten good pre-release buzz, but then again, so has every video game ever made.

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1. To be clear, my wife isn’t in the collectible plush market. She designs knitted toy patterns so people can make the stuffed animals themselves. ↑

Via Gothamist, here’s video of one of the new Brooklyn Bridge waterfalls—those supposed marvels of art and technology—in action.

… I’m missing something here, right? Does anyone care to let me in on the joke?

Remember on Tuesday when I mentioned that playing the atrocious Holosseum game in the early ’90s prompted me to realize that arcades were dead? I had a similar epiphany while reading the Space.com story “Disney’s Buzz Lightyear, Wall-E Explore Space for NASA.” Space is dead:

According to [space shuttle pilot Jim] Kelly, who spoke with collectSPACE afterwards, Disney made the right choice of characters to send to space. “I think that was a good choice on their part, given his background and his mission ‘to infinity and beyond.’ I think he was the right one to pick to go up to the space station,” said Kelly.

Kelly’s right. Thank goodness they didn’t choose a fictional character with less of a background in aeronautics. It could have been a disaster.

Note also the first comment posted to the story:

y do people like wall-e so much. it was just made by environmental freaks to show “what would happen”(supposedly) if we kept polluting the earth into thedistant future.

…

having a bunch of robots as small as wall-e clean up the planet afterwards is entirely impractical!!! where would they dump the trash once their collectors got full huh???

So, yeah, the Internet is over, too. Pack it in, folks. We had a good run. See you at the wrap party.

Weirs Beach, N.H., is an odd place for a mecca. Located on Lake Winnipesaukee, the largest body of water in New Hampshire’s tourist-friendly Lakes Region, Weirs Beach is a lazy strip of antique shops, mini-golf, and ice-cream stands. Why, there’s even a beach. It’s an unspectacular village, except for the fact that on its outskirts lies Funspot, the epicenter of nostalgic arcade gaming.

So, yeah, an odd place for a mecca, but I guess the incongruous locale is what makes something a “mecca” in the first place. Were Funspot located in a major city—somewhere easily accessible—it would just be a cool place to visit, or as Funspot’s slogan puts it, “The Spot For Fun!” (Clever.) You can’t have a mecca without an arduous pilgrimage.

When I was growing up in New Hampshire, though, Funspot wasn’t considered a mecca, and my “pilgrimage,” if you could call it that, was a scenic 45-minute drive. Having known and loved the place for most of my life, it has been fun, and somewhat bemusing, to watch Funspot’s star rise in geek culture to the point where it is considered the destination for classic gaming. The Spot For Fun is the site of annual video-game championships, it was featured prominently in the hit documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and it recently received the Guinness World Record for Largest Arcade.

Ten years ago, if you had asked me to predict whether Funspot would even exist in 2008, I would have shaken my head and given you a rueful “no.”

Funspot’s success is the result of tireless dedication to the unappreciated art of 1980s video games. It’s also the result of dumb luck.

What’s now hailed as The American Classic Arcade Museum was, about a decade ago, little more than a run-down arcade that never got new games. During the 1990s, most arcades tried to fight off competition from home consoles by exploiting their increasingly thin technological edge. This was the era of stillborn gimmicks like Holosseum¹, a quasi-holographic fighting game that I played once and remember only because that was the moment when I realized that arcades were dying.

During this era of crisis, rather than frantically upgrade its wares, Funspot stood pat. In retrospect, you might be tempted to interpret this as a principled stand, a realization that games were about fun rather than graphics, a deep spiritual appreciation of “gameness,” etc., etc.

No, the real reason Funspot stuck with its passé 1980s cabinets was more prosaic: The place is huge. I have no doubt that Funspot is deserving of its world record. Despite dozens of visits under my belt, I still get lost in its cavernous layout. Thanks to its hillside placement, a compartmentalized interior, and seemingly infinite rows of games, you’re never quite sure where you are in relation to the rest of the place. It’s like an amusement center on a Möbius strip.

If Funspot management had desired to fill this place with updated 1990s games, it would have been impossible. The cost would have been crippling, but more to the point, there simply weren’t enough games being made to occupy more than 10 or 20 percent of the floor space. The industry had cooled down too far since its peak. Funspot did offer a few of the new games from Sega, Namco, etc., but those modern machines were islands in the ocean of games acquired during the 1980s arcade glut.

This was always the knock on Funspot. It was a cool place, but man, those games were old. Of course, anyone familiar with recent gaming history knows that once my generation grew old enough to become wistful for their youth, those old games became an enormous asset—and, thanks to the collapse of the arcade industry, a rare one. Add a touch of savvy marketing, and the American Classic Arcade Museum was born.

Instant mecca.

That’s the “dumb luck” part. The “tireless dedication” part is important, too. Unlike pretty much every other arcade I’ve ever been to, Funspot management and staff give a damn whether their games are working or not. They don’t just give a damn; they literally care. Crazy, right?

My game is pinball, which relies on machines that are notoriously difficult to maintain. Unlike video games, which consist of a circuit board, a TV, and a button pad, pinball machines possess a rat’s nest under the hood. Pinball machines have circuit boards, too, but they also have solenoids, light bulbs, hundreds of hookup wires, and delicate switches, all of which are regularly subjected to pounding by 1-1/16” ball bearings.

Since the last “golden era” of pinball, the early- to mid-1990s, most arcade operators have either neglected their pinball machines or abandoned them altogether. One of the main reasons is that pins require too much upkeep. Funspot, to its unending credit, believes that pinball is worth the trouble.

Not all of Funspot’s pins are in perfect working order. I’ve visited the arcade twice this year. The first time, I was disappointed to find that White Water was dirty and some switches were broken. I played Pin-Bot instead. On a return trip last week, Pin-Bot had some weak-flipper juju going on, but White Water was sparkling and snappy.

This delighted me. They fixed their White Water. The staff at Funspot know how to clean a playfield and repair a stuck leaf switch. This is rare, too rare. My heart sinks when I spot an “out of order” sign on a pinball machine in the back of a bar, knowing that rather than have someone repair it, the proprietors will soon trade it in for a Golden Tee or Big Buck Hunter Pro.

While I was at the White Water machine, a floor manager noticed a transitory glitch with the start button that could have robbed me of a couple of credits. With no hesitation, he plunked some tokens into my cup and said he would have the techs take a look at it. Arcades have always outpaced even comic-book stores in their disdain for the paying customer. In this respect, Funspot departs from tradition. They’ve also bucked convention by failing to go bankrupt. Not a coincidence.

Last week was New Hampshire’s annual Motorcycle Week, when bikers ranging the gamut from Hell’s Angels to Hell’s Mid-Life Crises roar toward Lake Winnepesaukee for seven days of noise and beer. It’s like spring break for people who hate to wear a shirt but really ought to.

I arrived at Funspot to find that the arcade had rented out most of its parking lot to bike-vendor tents and chili-dog carts, and the sight of so many bike maniacs milling around was enough to scare away your average nerd.² The upshot: a practically empty Funspot. I had an entire afternoon to play any game I wanted, as long as I wanted. As a kid, I would be brought near tears at such an opportunity. As an adult, I went ahead and let myself cry a little. I’m comfortable expressing my emotions.

After plugging away at the aforementioned White Water and logging some time on other worthy pins like Funhouse and Fire!, I strolled the aisles to take in the scope of Funspot’s collection. I’m typically in a frenzy to maximize my playing time, so this was a new experience.

What I saw reminded me that the legacy of these ’80s games is built on more than kitsch. That programmers achieved such creative gameplay is astonishing not just because of the limited computer hardware but also because many of the game concepts were so basic they were borderline stupid, like Kickman or Food Fight.

I always imagined these games would lose their luster in adulthood, but in fact, I’m more able to appreciate how much fun they are. With the technological fascination long since faded, I can enjoy the games on their “playable” merits alone. And that’s the nice thing about this so-called “museum”: The exhibits are there to be touched and played. It’s less a museum than an arcade that time forgot. I hope time deigns to forget Funspot a good while longer.

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1. Holosseum was a conversion kit for the more widely known (and equally bad) Time Traveler game. ↑

2. I’m a veteran of many Motorcycle Weeks, of course, and I knew that my motorcycling friends mean me no harm. So I only soiled myself in terror once or twice on my way into the arcade. (No, they are harmless, for realsies.) ↑

Above is a Wordle of Geek Out New York—a frequency-based text cloud made from every word written on this site so far. Click the image to see the large version, and then go make your own!

“Once you can make a balloon dog, you can do anything.”

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Blow up. The inspirational balloon-dog line above comes from Twisted: A Balloonamentary, a documentary making its New York premiere this weekend and throughout next week. I saw an earlier cut of the film (one of the directors, Sara Taksler, is a friend) and couldn’t be happier to recommend it to GONY readers. The filmmakers immersed themselves in this surprisingly deep balloon-twisting world without “going native,” and the result is a moving look at a varied ensemble of characters. It’s easy to film a strange subculture and edit the footage together for entertainment purposes; it’s much harder to make a movie that seeks both to entertain and understand. Twisted made the extra effort to be emotionally and intellectually honest, and viewers are better off for it. The New York screening schedule and tickets are available at the Pioneer Theater site, and if you’re not in the New York area, you can buy the DVD from the official Twisted site.

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Don’t monopolize. The dirty secret of the classic board game Monopoly is that it’s not a very good game. There’s a bit of strategy, but the action is determined to an overwhelming degree by dice rolls. Worse yet, the game usually doesn’t end until long after the outcome is a foregone conclusion. It’s these drawbacks (and more) that explain the game’s dismal 4.5 rating on BoardGameGeek.

I still love Monopoly for the nostalgia, but if you want to scratch that “buying pieces of cardboard with colorful paper money itch,” you might try Acquire instead. Avalon Hill, the classic board-game designer that’s now a division of Wizards of the Coast (itself a subsidiary of Hasbro), is re-releasing some of their forgotten classics, and Acquire is the latest. It’s the first time Acquire—more a game of investment than pure acquisition—has been in print since 1999. It may not have the cachet of Rich Uncle Pennybags, but having tried it a few times in college, I can attest that’s Acquire is better than Monopoly from an “actually playing and enjoying” perspective. Available wherever fine board games are sold (expect to pay about 20 bucks).

“The kind of game you can pick up and play a few minutes at a time” is one of those standard game-review pullquotes, like “great replay value,” “redefines the genre,” etc. The PSP game Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 is, indeed, the kind of game you can pick up and play a few minutes at a time, but I don’t. I play it for hours on end.

I mentioned on Friday that the first Open Tee had consumed an embarrassingly large chunk of my life, and much to the detriment of my marriage, career, etc., the sequel is even better. The developers, Clap Hanz, took a novel approach to the new Open Tee, creating six new courses and 12 new characters while also including the courses and cast from the original. There’s a bunch of new tweaks and features, but all the familiar bits are there, as well. Clap Hanz grafted the new game onto the old.

As a result, the feel of the game is much the same, so this is the section of the video-game review template where I’m supposed to complain that the sequel doesn’t offer enough innovation. Actually, I welcome the lack of innovation. Thank you, Clap Hanz, for not innovating too much. I was playing the original, three-year-old Open Tee right up until the new edition arrived from Amazon last week. My abiding fear was that Clap Hanz would screw with things in Open Tee 2, try too hard to make it “new,” flex their programming muscle, and so on. Nope. This game is “Open Tee 2” in the most literal sense: They doubled the original.

Why does this make me so happy? It’s simple. I am freaking awesome at Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee.

No, really, I am. And I don’t care if it’s a silly PSP golf game. I’m proud of it. When I was a young teenager, I got really good at Crystal Caliburn, a pinball simulation for the Mac. I was talented enough at fake computer pinball that my name was listed in a book of world-champion video-game scores. I was inordinately thrilled with this small accomplishment, but when you’re 13, you’re supposed to be inordinately thrilled with such things. At 26, such pride is a little more unseemly, I admit.

Here’s the thing, though. Grand Theft Auto IV may be, as the reviewers say, a towering achievement in video games…nay, in art…nay, in human existence. But I will never be the best in the world at GTA 4. With work (or cheat guides) I can get to 100% completion, and then that’s it. And with games like Guitar Hero, in which greatness can be measured more objectively, there comes the problem of popularity. Too many people play Guitar Hero religiously for me to hope that I might become the greatest.

Open Tee, though, occupies that sweet spot on the Venn diagram where the “Games I’m Obsessed With” circle overlaps with “Games That Are Only Moderately Popular.” Not only that, but the sequel has made my years of Hot Shots Golf practice relevant again—hooray! Not only that, but Clap Hanz has added an online play feature so that I can regularly kick the asses of people I don’t even know—huzzah!

Yes, Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 is a game that most will play a few minutes at a time, yet I have never been able to stop there. And finally, all my hard work is worth it, I think.

I could expound on the reasons I fell in love with Hot Shots Golf in the first place—it simulates the nuances of golf pretty well for its cartoonish trappings, it has an addictive kinetic feel, the courses are well-designed—but the reason I play it anymore is mostly that it makes me feel on top of the world. What more can you ask from a $30 game?

“I have a million ideas, but they all point to certain death.”¹

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Chill out. I try to make a post whenever there's an event at the New York Explorers Club that's even a bit relevant to this site's topic matter—which comprises almost anything that happens at the Explorers Club, because it's the freakin’ Explorers Club. I love that such a thing exists. This weekend the freakin’ Explorers Club holds their 2008 film festival, with a focus on exploration into the planet's chilliest climes. I'll be out of town, sadly, but I would love to see Prize of the Pole (on Arctic explorer Robert Peary's darker side) and Strange Days on Planet Earth: Dirty Secrets (on environmental mysteries). The festival takes place at Explorers Club HQ, 40 E. 70th St., kicking off this evening and showing films throughout Saturday (full schedule).

Bet your life, again. The second showing of You Bet Your Life Live!, with announcing duties handled by this reporter, commences tonight at 10 p.m. For more details, check last weekend's events post.

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Practice your swing. Golf's U.S. Open takes place this weekend, but I'm going to make an educated guess and venture there's not a huge overlap between Geek Out New York readers and the audience that shares my enjoyment of televised golf. Fie on your love of fast-paced action! Perhaps I can tempt you with Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2, the just-released sequel to my favorite PSP game. I've lost hundreds of hours of my life to the first HSG: Open Tee, and I don't know if that makes it a good value or a bad influence. Probably both, but it's fun in any case.

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1. From an underappreciated flick. ↑

Baby Ruthless author and friend-of-GONY wrote to alert me to his defense of Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?, penned as a belated reaction to my calling the Jeff Foxworthy show a “cultural low point” while bitching about an even stupider show.

It’s a good read if you are a fan of the genre. I concur with most of the arguments, which mostly revolve around the show’s questions and rules. My complaints would concern pretty much everything else: the gimmicky premise, the mediocre host, the “cute” kids, the plodding pace, the low content-to-hype ratio, the fact that the show is impossible to watch without encountering spoilers of the very program you are watching, etc. Typical Fox game/reality fare.

All that said, it was probably a cheap shot to call Fifth Grader a “low point,” as it’s a family-friendly show that rewards knowledge (although it also draws much of its humor from contestants’ supposed lack of knowledge, so it’s a mixed bag). Moment of Truth is a far worse program, although I do think the show’s host, Mark L. Walberg, is a great emcee on other shows.

I’ve been on a game show kick here on GONY lately, and while The Price is Right may not be your thing, classic Password was among the nerdiest American game shows ever to see air.¹ The set was spare, the prizes were modest, and the game was simple: Using one word clues, get your partner to guess the “password.”

The original 1960s Password and most of its later incarnations were hosted by Allen Ludden, a great emcee with trademark plastic-rimmed glasses and an all-American face that belonged on a box of soda crackers. Ludden’s style was laconic and erudite, fitting a polite game of literacy.

The Password remake airing Sundays on CBS, with the obligatory “Million Dollar!” qualifier, is not so polite, and not so literate, but it’s better than I expected. Fremantle Media, the production juggernaut behind American Idol and other game/reality shows, holds the rights to the late Mark Goodson’s classic game-show formats. Fremantle has abused this privilege in recent years. It’s hard to say which earned Fremantle greater enmity from game-show fans: their despicably trashy 1998 Match Game revival, or their joyless 2001 mangling of Card Sharks.

Unlike those train wrecks, the creators of MDP have stuck to the essence of the original show, even dispensing with the “solve a password to solve a puzzle” wrinkle of Password Plus and Super Password, which aired in the late 1970s and 1980s. MDP is nothing but pure passwords, and they come rapid-fire, which is especially welcome in a world of “We’ll…open the…suitcase…right after…these…messages….”

Host Regis Philbin’s bombastic style couldn’t be less like Allen Ludden, which has generated some rancor among aficionados of the genre, but Philbin is one of the smoothest old-school broadcasters around, so it works for me. The real shame is that vast stretches of Regis’s participation in the show are relegated to post-production voiceovers. You can tell that dialogue was added in post when the timbre of Philbin’s voice suddenly changes and they don’t show him on camera while he’s speaking. This happens way too much in the first two episodes of MDP, and it’s not right for a talented ad-libber like Philbin. (This isn’t the only audio problem with MDP; relentless shrieks from the crowd, obviously sweetened in post, make the show an aurally exhausting experience.)

The celebrity guests have been a mixed bag, but again, better than expected overall. The producers made the effort to find skilled Password-playing celebrities—half the time. The first week saw a very sharp Neil Patrick Harris face off against Rachael Ray, who at times seemed unaware that she was even on a game show, or on Earth, for that matter. Similarly, Rosie O’Donnell outplayed her opponent on the second episode, a nervous Tony Hawk. A special episode to air tomorrow (Thursday) features Betty White, who may be old but is one of the best Password players of all time. (Her opponent is Susie Essman, who seems like she could be a dark horse.)

MDP’s bonus game sees contestants attempting passwords of increasing difficulty as they work their way up that now-familiar gimmick, the Who Wants to be a Millionaire-type “money tree.” This would be a fine game if it weren’t for the fact that MDP doesn’t let games spill over into the next episode like Millionaire and all its knockoffs do.

The upshot of this strange decision—playing a game of supposedly variable length in a set one-hour slot—is that toward the end of the show, the tension can disappear by virtue of looking at the clock. The second contestant to play the bonus game started her quest with about ten minutes to go in the hour, and it was obvious that she wouldn’t have time to make it even close to the million. (As expected, she crapped out after a couple rounds.)

The spoiler-by-time-slot aspect of the show is a huge problem, but put that and the grating loudness aside, and there’s a cerebral game under here. Game shows too often get a bum rap for being mindless entertainment, and primetime game shows of late have too often fit that bill. Kudos to Million Dollar Password for making us think, at least a little.

Million Dollar Password airs Sundays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time on CBS. A special episode airs tomorrow, June 12, also at 8:00.

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1. I say “American” game shows not to come off as some sort of cosmopolitan game-show elitist, but rather because I’ve seen plenty of British game shows that offer a stronger concoction of low budget and bookishness than most of what we’ve ever offered stateside. Search YouTube for Countdown and 15 to 1 to see what I mean. ↑

It's time for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, one of two occasions each year (along with the Macworld Expo) in which the entire internet joins together for one huge cluster-liveblog. Who am I to argue? I’m live on the scene at WWDC, where “live” means “technically alive” and “on the scene” means “at my desk refreshing other people’s liveblogs while I eat peanut butter straight out of the jar.” On with the show.

1:25 p.m.: Internet finally working again. Hat-tip to Time Warner Cable for the maddening delay. What did I miss? Let's see: eleventy-billion people signed up for the iPhone SDK, developers can use the same APIs Apple does, huge companies love the iPhone because “remote wipe” is now offered as a feature. “Remote wipe” seems like a feature that would come in handy in a lot of contexts. Attention technology innovators: more remote wiping, please.

1:28 p.m.: Jason Snell of Macworld notes on his liveblog, “It’s important to keep in mind that while this is a media event, it’s first and foremost a developer event, so Apple is taking great pains to give some meaty developer information to the thousands of Mac and iPhone developers in the crowd.” Translation: Good lord, this crap is boring so far.

1:32 p.m.: Scott Forstall, Jobs’s top iPhone minion, demonstrates how to make an iPhone application. It’s so easy, even the Senior Vice President of iPhone Software can do it! Forstall throws up a David Pogue quote: “You’re witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform.” Gross.

1:36 p.m.: Now you can do eBays on your iPhone. The eBay guy does a search for “Wii Fit cheap,” bringing up a bunch of auctions selling the equipment for twice the retail price.

1:41 p.m.: Movable Type demos their TypePad software, so I’m liveblogging the liveblogging of a live blogging demo on the iPhone. From Gizmodo: “WordPress tells me their native iPhone app is coming soon, somewhere around the end of the week or early next week.” Now that’s some inspired PR work. I think the WordPress guy should have just stood up when the Movable Type guy was done and screamed, “YEAH, US TOO!!! AT SOME VAGUE POINT IN THE FUTURE, WE WILL ALSO HAVE IPHONE BLOG TYPE THINGS, AND WHATNOT.”

1:45 p.m.: A news-gathering app from the Associated Presszzzzzzzzzz time for a bathroom break. Please bring back Steve Jobs and his patented madcap zaniness!

1:50 p.m.: This water-dripping app from Pangea Software looks pretty cool. Apparently it’s already available for Mac on their website (swamped at the moment). And then Major League Baseball shows off a baseball-scores app — holy crap, sports scores on your phone? Let’s iPhone party like it’s 1999!

1:55 p.m.: Next up in the Endless Parade of Boring Software: two med-student apps in a row. I can’t imagine the crowd isn’t getting restless at this point. “And now we present ‘Valentin Louis,’ a marvelous new app for Proust scholars!”

2:05 p.m.: Forstall took some time to crap on Windows Mobile. Hooray! Everybody’s happy again. That’s what the WWDC is all about, crapping on Microsoft. Kumbaya!

2:08 p.m.: Jobs is back. He used to do the Microsoft-crapping-on himself, but now he leaves that to the underlings. Is he getting too old for this? Jobs says iPhone 2.0 software update will be free for iPhone users, $9.95 for iPod Touch owners. Without even looking, I know that there are between three and four thousand comments on Engadget by now to the effect of “$10 for Touch? This iz outrage!!!” Expect this to be the flashpoint for Apple flamebaiters until the next keynote speech. Note: None of those commenters will actually own an iPod Touch.

2:15 p.m.: Apple marketing VP Phil Schiller gets on stage for a demo and calls Microsoft’s ActiveSync “ActiveStink.” Christ, you thought my “remote wipe” joke was in poor taste. Apple’s alternative is “MobileMe,” with the “Me” part in little cursive font. That name is no great shakes itself, Phil. Let’s see, what rhymes with “MobileMe”…”MobilePee”?! Genius! Oh man, I gotta get over to Gizmodo comment threads before anybody else posts that.

2:19 p.m.: Schiller says you can put all your personal information “in the cloud,” meaning on the Internet. I wouldn’t mind the phrase “in the cloud” dying a noble death. The cloud is fine as far as whiteboard diagrams go, but it’s a little too cutesy for any other context.

2:22 p.m.: So MobileMe is Apple’s replacement for “.Mac,” their very crappy online-services package that has been embarrassing the company for years. This isn’t as boring as the med-student iPhone maps, but still, I can’t get excited about a synchronization app. Oh great, your iPhone photos synchronize with your online MobileMe folders. This is the killer feature for every electronics device. You have to be able to take a photo and send it somewhere else immediately. Apple will not rest until we can cram photos into every crevice of our existence within nanoseconds of hitting the shutter button. Steve Jobs is the Cookie Monster of photos. ME LOVE PHOTOS!

Why? Is Grandma sitting at home on her laptop, hitting F5 like a coke fiend waiting for your MobileMe photo folder to update? Let’s relax, people. Your blurry snapshots from the jumbo slide at the water park are not a top-priority item, whatever you might think.

2:30 p.m.:

The MobileMe logo is awfully lame for an Apple effort. It bears a strong resemblance to the logo for one of the worst Microsoft operating systems ever:

2:37 p.m.: In the past decade or so, Nintendo has gained a reputation for putting out mediocre versions of exciting new products only to make people rebuy the same thing a year later when they finally get it right. The original Game Boy Advance was a tank; the Game Boy Advance SP was a work of art. Ditto for the first Nintendo DS and its successor, the DS Lite. The original iPhone was a beautiful product, but still, I think Apple might be taking notes; the first iPhone inexplicably sported a recessed headphone jack, making it unusable with the majority of non-Apple headphones. The new iPhone 3G has a regular headphone jack, and I want one if for no other reason than being able to use my Sennheiser “cans” with my phone. I do hate that recessed jack so.

Also, the 3G iPhone has, you guessed it, 3G. That’s about a million times faster than EDGE. Now I won’t have to wait so damn long to download my por…um, my technology news websites. Of course, the Achilles Heel of 3G is that the radio eats the battery right quick. Macworld has this:

The iPhone has 5 hours of 3G talk time. [Jobs said,] “That’s actually a very large amount of 3G talk time. We’re very proud of this.” Browsing is 5-6 hours of high-speed browsing. 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio. (Small text; “All figures are ‘up to’). [Emphasis added.]

Remember that small text a few months from now when the first class-action lawsuits are filed. “Marge, the 3G iPhone gets five hours of talk time, in theory. In theory, Communism works. In theory.”

2:47 p.m.: The new model has real-time tracking GPS, as well, to save you all that tiresome hassle of “looking around” and “being aware of your surroundings” and “not getting hit by a bus.”

The base model sells for 200 bucks. No joke, that is a good deal. There’s another new line of argument for the trolls: “Haha, all you iPhone owners should have waited for 3G! Now it’s faster AND cheaper. Suckers!” That’s the first rule of computer and gadget purchases: Never buy anything.

2:52 p.m.: And that’s it. iPhone apps, a .Mac replacement, and a 3G iPhone. Exactly what everybody expected, which means that everybody will now be disappointed. Steve Jobs keynotes are always built up as life-changing events, but as with many things, we remember the ones that satisfy the perceived trend and forget the rest. I remember attending the NYC Macworld keynote in 1999, when Jobs introduced the iBook, featuring AirPort. Wireless networking was brand-new then, and when Jobs pulled the little stunt of browsing the Internet while waving a hula hoop around the computer—“no strings attached”—the crowd went nuts. The next year, Jobs unveiled the Power Mac G4 Cube, which ended up being a market failure but was a very exciting machine.

So in 2001, I dragged my roommate Hank with me to the show, assuring him that the keynote was the ultimate stage act in the tech world and that The Great Steve Jobs would not let us down. But he did, and how. The 2001 NYC keynote was a dud, most notorious for an Apple engineer’s interminable explanation of the “megahertz myth.” No kidding, I left the keynote hall mad that day. Steve Jobs had embarrassed me in front of my best friend. How dare he not transform the computer industry according to my whims!

Having gained some perspective since then, I’ve come to accept that sometimes a trade show is just a trade show. Perhaps I’ve lost that deep-down gadget lust; maybe for most observers, the widely predicted announcement of the 3G iPhone was a big deal. But for me, today’s keynote was a reminder that while the tech industry is supposedly fast-paced, most change truly is incremental. A somewhat faster iPhone, a moderately improved syncing service, shinier sports scores on your phone, etc.

We flock to Jobs because once in a great while he does deliver a game-changing touchdown. But more often, to extend the football metaphor, he simply advances the ball down the field enough for a first down. As any gridiron purist will tell you, that’s a pretty impressive feat in itself.

“A quiz show? Only actors who are completely washed up resort to a quiz show.”¹

Geek Out

Bet your life. The classic Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life comes alive again this Saturday in Williamsburg—although Groucho himself doesn’t come alive, because that would be downright disturbing. Instead, performer Lisa Levy has adapted the format for the stage, and audience contestants will have a chance to play for glory and moderately priced prizes.

Stepping into the George Fenneman role as announcer/sidekick is John Teti. As Groucho used to say, “Oh, that’s me!” Yes, I’m part of the show, and I also wrote the questions and other material, so if you don’t come, I’ll probably cry. It’s Saturday, 10:00-11:00 p.m. at the Brick Theater (575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, near the Metropolitan Ave. L and G subway stops).

Meet the people behind the panels. The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art holds its annual festival/fundraiser this weekend, and MoCCA has assembled a murderer’s row of cartoonists, including Ruben Bolling, R. Sikoryak, Lynda Barry, “and much more.”² Fifteen bucks buys a pass to the festival floor in the Puck Building (295 Lafayette St., Manhattan) for the entire weekend—Saturday and Sunday 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Geek In

Woof. In keeping with my Cold War fixation in this space, and the weekend’s comic-related festivities, I recommend spending an evening with Laika, a graphic novel by Nick Abadzis about the stray dog who was sent up in Sputnik II to die in the name of propaganda. There are countless episodes from the Cold War that offer a greater loss of life in terms of pure casualties, but the pointless sacrifice of Laika is one of the most poignant stories from that era.

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1. According to perhaps the greatest comedian of the 20th Century. ↑

2. I’ll try to contain my disappointment that my favorite comic artist, Michael Kupperman, will not be in attendance. ↑

When you read my paean to the daily Price is Right show recaps on Golden-Road.net, it probably didn’t seem possible that I undersold them. But honestly, I did.

Beyond the best-in-class game recaps, previously discussed, are the recap discussion threads. Sure, there’s a lot of chaff there, mostly by members who post gripping tales of how they played the game at home. (“Half the chatroom were split on the 1 and the 7. I was one of the ones that guessed the 7.”) Hidden among the monotony, though, is some high geek drama.

The latest episode to set the recap forums aflame comes courtesy of GR.net user Voltron291, who joined the May 29 recap thread to post his 1850-word recap of his recent trip to the show. Note the title at the top of Voltron’s post: “Part One.” This is only part one!

“Volty,” as he’s known on the boards, is a pricing savant, perhaps the ultimate TPIR geek. Plenty of fans know the intricacies of the show’s production, but Volty is part of an elite group that has committed to memory the prices of bedroom furniture, menstrual cramping pills, jet skis, trips to Puerto Vallarta, etc. I love that there are people out there like this.

But hubris fells even the noblest geek. As we learn in the first part of Voltron’s epic yarn, trouble arises when, despite being at the head of the line, he is told by a page that he has to sit in Row 4 and should not attempt to assist any of the on-stage contestants. Turns out the show staff has noticed his pricing abilities, along with his tendency to inform dozens of people in line that they should look to him for the winning answers. He protests the show’s decision, to no avail.

By this point [show-runner] Roger [Dobkowitz] tells the page … to offer us seats in front of Rich’s podium which he thinks are better seats, but obviously we’re not going to stand for that. Eventually it gets to a point where the page tells us [executive producer] Syd Vinnedge said we can’t sit in the front, and at that point I know it’s over and we’re stuck where we are in the 4th row.

Tensions escalate during the showcase round.

Showcases: After I see the furniture, I know Michael is going to pass, and I signal to April’s group to bid $17,200 – she ends up bidding $15,500 which I thought wasn’t too bad. However, during the 2nd showcase, someone from the producer’s table gets up and blocked my view of the turntable so that I couldn’t see Michael and Michael couldn’t find me in the audience. Instead, I signal to Michael’s group in the front row to bid $30,000, and at which point my mom tells me that every last person at the producer’s table was looking directly at me while I was trying to signal. I looked back angrily at them and they all turned away.

See that looking glass? We’re through it, people.

I was eager for Part Two, and Voltron did not disappoint, with a 3,300-word tome in the June 2 recap thread. In this installment, Voltron is pulled from line and given a lecture by longtime TPIR producer Roger Dobkowitz himself. Roger gives Volty the old Vegas back-room treatment, asking the Rainman of pricing games to kindly STFU or leave. It’s worth reading the entire thing, but here’s the nut:

Roger used an analogy to compare what these terms and conditions were — he compared it to catching a card counter in Las Vegas — if they are caught, they have to either comply (which they likely won’t) or they will get banned from coming back.

Comments in the wake of Voltron’s now-complete epic predictably split into camps of “Sensible”…

[I]t probably didn’t help your case that you made literal arrangements with the first 50-100 people in line to be the “go-to-guy.”

and “Other”:

Wow, Roger, you just opened up a can of worms that I’m not so sure you’re prepared to close. I think it’s time that, if someone from the show actually does read this forum, we’re going to need some real answers.

Aside from being hilarious, this is a textbook example of why TV shows are wary of their most hardcore fans. I worked at a popular, long-running cable show for a couple years, and we always treated the rabid portions of the fanbase like they were radioactive (or, for that matter, rabid). That’s mostly because they were really annoying, but also because any unnecessary contact could result in rage and heartache.

The upside, of course, if you don’t work at TPIR, is that you get to sit back and enjoy the taut psychological thriller that is the GR.net recap threads. Hooray for the Internet.

As the sun dipped below the horizon in perfect alignment with 42nd St., sending waves of orange across skyscraper facades, tricking the eye with visions of evening traffic headed into fiery oblivion, a man approached the crowd that had assembled on Tudor City Place to stand in awe of the spectacle. “What is this?” he said.

“The sunset,” someone answered.

“I used to live on 106th Street. You could see it every night there,” the man said. He walked away.

Such is the narrow appeal of Manhattanhenge, an astronomical phenomenon that’s at once cosmic and provincial.

Manhattan’s so-called “east-west” streets actually run 30 degrees clockwise of true east and west, hewing to the contours of the island. (So “450 West 57th St.” is technically “450 West-northwest 57th St.”) Twice a year, Manhattanhenge¹ occurs when the azimuth of the sunset aligns with that off-kilter angle of the city streets—300 degrees, to be more precise.

In practical terms, it’s the moment when you can stand on the east side of the island and gaze all the way across the city to watch the sun set.

Tudor City Place, a tiny road that runs along the Tudor City apartment complex, has become a prime destination for ‘Hengers. It’s on the east edge of the city, and it crosses one of the wide major cross-streets (42nd), both prerequisites for optimum viewing. There are a number of points in Manhattan that fit that bill, but Tudor City Place has the benefit of being a quiet overpass, so you don’t have to dart between speeding cars to get that perfect up-the-middle shot.

Manhattanhenge isn’t such a marquee event that the Tudor City Place crowd was overwhelming when I visited last Thursday. At its peak, the group numbered a comfortable 90 or so, and many of those were there by accident. Andrea, a Tudor City resident, told me, “I looked out here and thought, ‘What are all these people doing in my area?’” She joined us with her, for lack of a better word, boyfriend (“Um, I guess you could call him that”) and stood on the outskirts of the pack, staring partly at the sunset and partly at these strange people who had assembled for an event she still didn’t entirely understand.

It seemed most of the attendees had gotten word of Manhattanhenge in the same raggedy fashion, as there’s no central clearinghouse for obscure Manhattan-only astronomy events. Some had been told by friends; others had heard about it on Gothamist or other blogs. Preschool director Emily Shapiro read a blurb in AM New York and and decided to come so she’d “have something to talk about with 4-year-old kids.”

Ariel Cohen’s interest was piqued by a source close to my heart: game shows. “I was watching Jeopardy! one night, and a contestant, Michael Pollock², said that he was the foremost authority on the Manhattan Stonehenge.” Cohen said last Thursday was his third Manhattanhenge, all of which he’s viewed from Tudor City. “Next year, I’m thinking about watching from Long Island City,” he said. There were nods of agreement. The conventional wisdom is that Manhattanhenge ought to be viewed in Manhattan, but the unencumbered sightlines of the L.I.C. high-rises across the East River were enticing.³

When the sun came into view, the masses raised their arms, cameras in hand, and squinted into LCD viewfinders. The early birds who had snapped up the best spots at dead center fiddled with digital SLRs or, in the case of a Fox 5 crew, a lumbering Betacam. Curious latecomers on the outside mostly had to make do with cell phone cameras, unprepared as they were for this titanic moment in astronomical history.

A few minutes of reverent snapping commenced. Then, abruptly, the sun passed the horizon. “Is it down?” an elderly man asked. He answered himself: “Yup.” A few people applauded, and from then on it was indistinguishable from any other sunset (the type you might be able to view from, oh, I don’t know, 106th Street).

Still, there was a pride among newfound friends that we’d witnessed this convergence of urban and solar planning. People often accuse New Yorkers of believing that the world revolves around us, but that’s not quite right. Twice a year, the sun does, too.

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1. “Manhattanhenge” is one of those great neologisms, like “[insert topic of scandal here]-gate,” that makes sense only if you don’t think about it very much. It gets the gist across perfectly, but then, wait a minute—Stonehenge isn’t located in “Stone.” ↑

2. I couldn’t find any contestants by the name of Michael Pollock in recent Jeopardy! history, but Cohen probably meant Michael Condouris, a Manhattanhenge admirer who placed second on the June 8, 2007 episode of the show. ↑

3. Cohen gave a shout-out to his wife and newborn child, which I promised to include, so here it is, shouting out. ↑