Jonathan Dobres

Joss Whedon should suffer for what he’s done to me. A friend of mine was kind enough to loan me the trade paperbacks of Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, and I’ve been hitting the bottle hard ever since.

I haven’t dived this deep into the Marvel Universe since I was eleven, maybe twelve years old. My introduction to the X-Men came courtesy of my uncle. Like my grandfather (his father), my uncle is a pack rat. While my grandfather held onto tax returns from 1970 and newspaper clippings that were probably printed along with a Gutenberg Bible, my uncle was a quintessential comic book collector. At some point in 1992, the bulk of his collection ended up in my parents’ basement while he moved his family to Long Island. He had everything worth owning, including original copies of the Dark Phoenix Saga. Naturally, I was told that if I so much as thought about these comics too hard, let alone touch them, they could incur damage, but this did get me interested enough to track down some trade paperback versions.

As it happened, FOX began airing the immensely successful X-Men animated series that same year. My friends and I were taken by Storm (one). It was a real Beast of an obsession (two!), as if we had Nightcrawlers scampering over our meninges, inducing a brain fever (too much?).

Considering what a huge dork I was am, and considering that I had recently been granted an immensely generous four dollar weekly allowance, things could have gotten ugly fast. Luckily, my group tended to stay away from the actual X-Men comics. This was the early 90s, and it was a definite low point in the quality of comic books. Long-running titles were atrociously written, incomprehensible to new readers, or trying way too hard to reach out.

Instead, my friends and I found an outlet for the mutant craze at a local indoor flea market. My memory has shattered this place into just a handful of surviving fragments. There was a Goth Magic Shoppe near what I thought of as the front entrance, which sold incense, henna tattoos, and crystal figurines of gryphons and wizards. There was a guy who could airbrush just about anything onto a white Hanes t-shirt. This was also the place where I picked up a pair of sunglasses tinted an obscene shade of red, so that I could pretend to be Cyclops. Finally, there were the comic book guys, and if memory serves (which, granted, it often does not), they made Comic Book Guy look eerily accurate.

This being a flea market, the comic book guys dabbled in other items as well. I yawned when they tried to pitch me (hah! wait for it!) baseball cards (see??). Baseball cards were already in decline, and even though my dad had proudly collected, sleeved, and boxed entire seasons’ worth of NHL Upper Deck trading cards, the interest was not exactly genetic.

I’d like to pause now to relate a small epiphany I just had regarding my father. I had always assumed that I got my dork powers from my mother’s side of the family. This is where the comic book collecting uncle resides, and combined with my mother’s line-quotingly strong devotion to the original Star Trek, it seemed only logical (stop me before I kill again!) that the genes came from her. Now I’m confronted with the memory of my father collecting trading cards, and not baseball cards, like a normal human being, but hockey cards. As if he was some kind of _Canadian. _Apparently my father is also a huge dork, just one that obsesses over sports instead of superheroes.

In a calculated effort to separate a twelve year-old from his allowance, the comic book guys trotted out packs of Marvel Masterpieces.¹ These were trading cards that depicted the Marvel Universe’s greatest heroes and most notorious villains in stunning detail. It seems almost criminal that there was never a card for Professor Xavier, but I suppose it’s hard to do a good action shot of a wheelchair.

It’s difficult to say why I liked the cards so much. The art is the main feature, and I’m pleased to see that it holds up well with the passage of time, for the most part. Take this rendition of Nightcrawler, for instance. It’s ethereal, almost Impressionist, and a fitting artistic choice for a man who can vanish in a BAMF of smoke and instantly reappear somewhere else. Unlike most of what the comic conglomerates put out in the early 90s, these showed real care and attention to detail. You could say they were items of quality. You could also say that these were the first real commodities that me and my friends purchased independently, and in trading them amongst ourselves, we got our first taste of power, leverage, and value. “Value,” is, of course, a highly subjective term. Outside our little bubble, the cards were not worth the paper they were printed on, literally. These trading cards would lead almost directly to an extended addiction to Magic: the Gathering, which, beyond the cool art, also came with a game. It also came with industry-sponsored magazines² that listed the current market value of the cards, which pretty much ruined the fun for everyone.

I thought I had left this life behind me. I thought I had graduated from Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters, aside from the occasional Hugh Jackman-laiden Hollywood iteration. Apparently I was wrong. It’s extremely easy to be drawn back to this world. Comics (and things inspired by comics) represent a series of moments reduced to their bare essentials. The beauty of it is that you can add whatever you want into the gaps between the panels. At twenty-six, you can take the bones of Joss Whedon’s excellent (as always) writing and add any number of complex social subtexts into the book. At eleven, you do something arguably much more important. You add yourself.

A new wallpaper! Click the image above to download a 1440x900 version. I know that Jon Hicks pretty much has the design market cornered on overlapping circles, but I couldn’t resist.

The explosion of circles and the broken vertical lines were generated using Context Free Art, which I found via the online implementation, which I found via Hans John Gruber. God bless our glorious, golden age of hyperlinks, because creating those circles and dashes in Photoshop or Illustrator by hand would’ve taken me hours. In Context Free Art they took minutes. I suppose I could have gotten clever with dynamic brushes, but it still would’ve been immensely time consuming to get the variations right. In Context Free Art it was just a matter of setting up a few lines of code and pressing Render until I got something I liked. Then off we go to Photoshop to apply what I like to think of as a mid-90s muted color scheme.

As Raskin points out, the whole thing is reminiscent of the ancient Turtle Graphics system, which was designed to teach kids about programming languages. This is harder than it sounds. At their cores, computers are nothing but glorified calculators (more accurately, glorified abacuses). As such, computers are fundamentally boring. Kids are often presented with a thrilling mathscape, and told to program over the course of a week what their pocket calculators could do in seconds. On the other hand, if the teacher gets too ambitious it can feel like you’re being asked to increase the amount of justice in the universe. With a FOR loop.

Enter Turtle Graphics, which for my money has the best programming metaphor ever conceived. Rather than adding numbers, you’re drawing pictures. How are you drawing? Why, there’s a little turtle on the screen who is eager to follow your instructions. Wherever the turtle goes, it draws a line, and from there the possibilities are endless. All the problems of learning about computer programming are solved. Abstraction is reduced to near zero, as you can see the results of your program line by line. It’s not math, it’s art, and at the end of the day you get something that you can print out and magnetize to the fridge.

I must have been in middle school when our Computers teacher introduced us to the turtle. Within ten minutes we had learned how to draw a square. It was just matter of telling the turtle to move forward, turn 90 degrees, and then move forward some more.

forward 50 right 90
forward 50 right 90
forward 50 right 90
forward 50 right 90

Then we learned the shortcut.

repeat 4 [forward 50 right 90]

Since most of us had taken Geometry, it was an easy step up to more complicated shapes.

repeat 6 [forward 50 right 60]

Now I was staring proudly at a blue hexagon. My blue hexagon. For someone with no innate talent for pencils and paper, the geometrically perfect image on the screen was like a revelation. Maybe I could be good at this, I thought.

“Alright, class, five bonus points on Friday’s quiz to the first person who can draw me a circle.”

We all sat there, stumped. To draw a shape, you started with the number of sides. We all got that. Circles, however, do not have sides or angles. They were a smooth mystery. What do circles have? I thought. If I were trying to go all the way around a circle, how would I…

And then came one of those bursts of insight that is so satisfying you’ll remember it fourteen years later.

Degrees. Circles have degrees.

repeat 360 [forward 1 right 1]

And that’s how you get a turtle to draw a large, graceful arc on the screen, with the end meeting the start. I got my five bonus points and called it a day.

Turtle Graphics led to Mac Paint, then Paint, then Visual Reality, and ultimately, inevitably, Photoshop. Context Free Art is to my 2008 what Turtle Graphics was to my 1994. It’s little wonder that I like it so much. I expect to mess around with this thing a lot before I’m through with it.

Yesterday, the batteries in my Mighty Mouse finally died on me. It’s been about three months, so that’s pretty reasonable. On the whole I’m pleased with the Mighty Mouse. I’ve always preferred mice to trackpads, and I figured that when you’re already ponying up the cash for a MacBook Pro, what’s a few more bucks for the Bluetooth-enabled mouse?

In most ways it’s exactly what I want from a mouse. It’s got no cord to perpetually wrap and unwrap, which was a big selling point. The wireless connection is solid. It fits nicely in my hand, even with my Crypt Keeper fingers. The four-way scroll ball is well implemented and has proven surprisingly useful. This particular mouse, unlike certain others, doesn’t leave presents for me on the kitchen countertop. Another bonus.

The Mighty Mouse still has a few problems, some of them downright perplexing. Granted, Apple has always been…eccentric…about mice. Remember the hockey puck? Is there a word that means the opposite of ergonomic, because that would describe the hockey puck perfectly. And yes, despite not owning an Apple computer until this past September I have every right to complain about that ancient peripheral. My high school was brimming with first generation iMacs. I’m more than familiar with the hockey puck, believe me.

There are two things that one can do with a mouse:

1. Point
2. Click

One of my issues with the Mighty Mouse is that it doesn’t always click appropriately. When a product only has two functions, it’s a big deal when one of them malfunctions even slightly. Still, the problem crops up so infrequently that the benefits of the mouse weigh in favor of continued use. I doubt that the click problem has anything to do with the wireless connection. Instead, I’m almost certain that it’s a byproduct of the Mighty Mouse’s biggest problem, which usually plays itself out in three acts:

1. It’s a one-button mouse.
2. No, wait, it’s a two-button mouse.
3. What?

The Mighty Mouse is a two-button mouse. There are right and left mouse buttons straddling either side of the scroll ball, you just can’t see them or feel them. The Mighty Mouse is covered by a smooth plastic shell that conceals what should be the most obvious feature of the device. Even when you click the mouse, the shell depresses as a single unit. It’s a huge usability error that sows confusion and makes rocker gestures impossible. The fact that right-button functionality is off by default in Mac OS adds to the confusion.

Likewise, the Mighty Mouse has extra buttons on the right and left sides of the mouse, but in fact, these are one button. It’s supposed to, I don’t know, wrap around the bottom of the mouse? It’s nonsensical. Why would you trick me into thinking I’ve got two side buttons when I actually only have one?

Apple’s staunch refusal to leave the one button design is understandable. To a novice computer user, there’s pointing and there’s clicking (see List 1, above). I’m sure it’s hard for most of you to remember this, but the distinction between right and left clicks is something you had to learn. Naïve computer users don’t get it off the bat.

Still, this position is paradoxical for Apple, especially in 2007. Apple builds only high-quality machines and blatantly prides itself on that. They have neither the need nor the desire to build a computer for the lowest common denominator. Why, then, would they make a mouse for them? Sure, it’s possible to be a naïve user who also wants to start with a high quality product, but catering to that microscopic subset of consumers doesn’t make any sense. People who have no idea how to wrap their hands around a two-button mouse are a dying breed. No, literally, they tend to be elderly, and they’re dying. I rest my case.

You know what’s cool? Hardware that looks like what it does, not hardware that looks like an oversized Vicodin. Just my personal opinion.

I’ve often asked myself, “Self, do you think Harmonix was nervous as they built the original Guitar Hero? Was there some trepidation about the song list, the feel of the controller, and whether it would all fly with consumers? Or did it just hit them like a bolt of lightning? Did they just know, after some critical point in development, that this game was going to be one of the best things to ever happen?”

I’d really love to know the answer to this question, but the answer won’t be coming from Rob Walker. He’s written a little piece on Guitar Hero for the New York Times. Walker’s unsurprising conclusion is that people love Guitar Hero in part because it allows them to pretend that they are, at least for a moment, rock stars. The article’s title—“The Pretenders”—is a bit of a giveaway on that point.

Walker says that playing Guitar Hero is nothing like playing a real guitar, a statement that always bothers me when it is made. Incidentally, Doom doesn’t train you to be a Marine and Pacman isn’t actually eating anything. Still, Walker extrapolates this idea to an interesting place. If Guitar Hero isn’t real guitar, then it’s the game’s “aspirational” elements that make it so attractive to such a wide community of players. Everybody has had the rock star fantasy. Everybody wishes they could play “Freebird,” or “Black Magic Woman,” or “More Than A Feeling”. Are they willing to strap on a little plastic guitar with brightly colored buttons to make their fantasies come true? Of course they are, videogame stigma be damned.

The power of this fantasy should not be underestimated, and the makers of Guitar Hero certainly cater to it. The selectable guitars, the character models, the choosing of a band name, the silly in-jokes, and the increasingly dramatic tutorials all serve the fantasy. I would argue, however, that Guitar Hero succeeds because it is a fundamentally great game, and the fantasy is secondary to that. Like all great games, its play mechanic is simple at the start, made even simpler by the literal guitar controller which replaces the standard gamepad, and yet it scales upwards towards near merciless difficulty as the player masters the basic skills. Guitar Hero’s great achievement is that it tricks novices, by way of fantasy fulfillment, into thinking they’re not playing a videogame.

Yet a videogame it still is. The heavy metal trappings may lure in the novice player, but the ornaments vanish when you’re actually playing. Quite literally, all you can see are the notes, and all that carefully rendered rock-god animation is irrelevant. It’s hard to showboat without getting booed off the stage. Most players eventually make that critical mental transition from playing a song to beating a song. Yes, it’s fun to score 99% on Medium, but isn’t it even better to do it on Hard, to prove that I can push myself that much further? Stepping up to Hard puts me negligibly closer to “real” guitar, but tremendously alters my level of play (in both senses of the word). This is the game, not the fantasy. Like any great videogame, Guitar Hero has its psychotic adherents, and between these people and the casual players there lies a wide spectrum of commitment levels. I’d be thrilled to master Hard, but I have no desire to torture myself on Expert. The Tall One, on the other hand, won’t be satisfied until he’s conquered “Through the Fire and the Flames” on Expert with his eyes closed. By the way, all of Dragonforce’s songs sound like that.

The need to solve a puzzle. The desire to defeat an opponent. These are universals, and “videogame players” have been tapping into them digitally for decades now. It takes a game like Guitar Hero to open that door to the wide swathe of humanity that thinks the wrong things about videogames, that feels the need to put “videogame player” in quotes. So yes, Mr. Walker, we all want to be rock stars, and we’re all willing to settle for playing pretend, but that’s secondary at best. More importantly, we all want to beat the game.

Zeldman has some interesting thoughts on the neutral option often seen in opinion scales:

Let users choose from five stars, and they nearly always pick three. Three is the little bear’s porridge, neither too hot nor too cold. Three is neutral—a safe place to hide. Even in the virtual world, where nothing more consequential is being asked than an opinion, many people would rather equivocate than commit.

He makes some great points, particularly in regards to using the neutral option as a way to avoid offending friends (think “Maybe” in eVite invitations). This is essentially a designer’s critique of the ubiquitous Likert scale, by far the most common type of questionnaire in social science research.

Back in junior high school we had a semester-long class on careers. The class feels like ancient history to me and I only remember two things about it. One is that our teacher had that Southern tendency to overemphasize the “Wh” sound. “Class, remember, whhhat you put down on the whhhite paper should match what you put down on the whhhorksheet.” The second is that a big part of this class involved the administration of an extensive career questionnaire, with scales and question clusters designed to place you at a particular point along eight different axes. Are you a people person? Do you like working with numbers? Creating artwork? Filing things? You get the idea.

It’s been a while, but I believe there were seven billion questions on this thing, all coded using the standard five point Likert paradigm. I remember that when our results came back, my report showed surprisingly few career suggestions, mostly, I was told, because I had picked the neutral option so often. Showing a definitive preference for very few of the questions, the computer didn’t know what to make of me.

The trick here is that neutral doesn’t always mean neutral. I was fourteen years old. Faced with a question like, “I would prefer working with the sick or infirm,” neutral really meant, “I’m fourteen and I don’t know anything about the world or what I want from it. I don’t know.” In a certain sense, I still don’t.

Consider the Sastisfaction with Life Scale. We use this one as part of our research at the hospital, and judging by the number of citations the scale receives in scholarly journals, we’re not the only ones. I like to think of it as a five question existential nightmare. How can you expect a person to grade a statement like, “If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing,” on a five point agree/disagree continuum? Lots of people get thrown when I ask this in our interviews. After administering this scale over one hundred times, I have a hunch that neutral often means, “I don’t know how to answer that.”

I’d be very curious to see what happens when you delete the neutral option and replace it with, “I don’t know.” Maybe come up with two different variations. In one, the new option replaces neutral’s position. In the other, the new option is listed as a separate entity from the levels of agreement and disagreement. Absolute neutrality is a rarity in real life. Republican? Democrat? Maybe you really are one of those coveted undecided voters, but I’ll bet that if it came down to it, you’d admit to leaning ever so slightly one way or the other. Professing ignorance is qualitatively different from professing neutrality. People generally tend to love the latter and hate the former. Replacing the neutral with the unknown gives people a reason to commit instead of a place to hide.

Reclusive rocker Sly Stone in a recent, rare public appearance. My coworker, squinting at the picture from a distance and at an odd angle, asked, “Is that the Pope?”.

The Pope.

I really wish it was.