However, I have to say I’m quite disappointed in this one, and wouldn’t really recommend it.

I thought the first one was all right, if a tad simplistic/expositional in parts (I particularly objected to the presence of an explanation for why a monarch would try to divide the noble class, but I suppose it was justified due to the young age of the main characters at the time). I thought that the later books would be better, and so picked up Forest Mage.

Forest Mage was quite a drag to read. I really think that Hobb could have done with some serious intervention on the part of an editor for the latter two books. They’re both way too long, and paced poorly, so that some events proceed very quickly while others far too slowly—and I found that it was often the events that seemed most interesting that were zoomed through, while the more tedious parts were dwelt on in great depth. Even with more even pacing, I think they were too long, and that’s not a complaint I make too often about books.

I only finished Forest Mage out of sheer bloody-mindedness, and then tackled Renegade’s Magic in the same spirit. The world is interesting, but Hobb’s exploration of colonialism felt terribly shallow, and the protagonist is extremely annoying. The main reason for this is his passivity—from quite early on, I found myself wondering why he wasn’t doing anything, why he was hiding from the realities that faced him. Granted, this is entirely plausible as a reaction from him, but that doesn’t help much. It’s still extremely irritating to go through page afer page of it.

I’ve never read Hobb under her Megan Lindholm name, but was very impressed indeed with The Farseer Trilogy. It appears that she struck gold with those characters and that milieu. The Soldier Son books just aren’t good enough, and I found her Liveship Traders series shallow and unconvincing (even though it’s in the same world as the Farseer and Tawny Man books). I’m hoping for better from her next time out, but suggest avoiding Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, and Renegade’s Magic.

[The FCC] cannot change a well-established course of action without supplying notice of and a reasoned explanation for its policy departure.

—UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT No. 06-3575, CBS et al. v. FCC, p14
and

The Commission’s determination that CBS’s broadcast of a nine-sixteenths of one second glimpse of a bare female breast was actionably indecent evidenced the agency’s departure from its prior policy. Its orders constituted the announcement of a policy change&8212;that fleeting images would no longer be excluded from the scope of actionable indecency.

—UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT No. 06-3575, CBS et al. v. FCC, p30

The whole thing was always a ridiculous faux-controversy over virtually nothing, of course, and it irks me that the court agrees with the idea that Janet Jackson’s breast was “bare” in that fleeting moment, when in fact her nipple was covered. It’s already insane that people would get so upset about nine-sixteenths of a second’s worth of bare breast (the horror!), but to get so upset when Jackson’s breast was not bare but had ‘a silver sunburst “shield” covering her nipple’—that’s truly crazy.

There are certainly reasons to object to broadcasters using human flesh to peddle various things, but to have the country freak out over OMG-it-might-have-been-naked-but-it-was-gone-too-fast-to-really-see, that’s just really embarrassing.

Given that the FCC were (and presumably are) trying very hard to pander to right-wing nutjobs, I don’t think this will alter their attitude, but it’s nice to see they’re not getting away with it in this instance.

Another problem with it is that there are times, even when your disease is flourishing, when you have to just sit and wait to accumulate more evolution points to spend—they clearly need to tweak the model for how you progress when you’ve infected huge numbers of the world’s population.

(Note: the only time my disease wiped out humanity so far, it started in Madagascar.)

Worth a look, but I think the game really points towards how a theoretical better version could be a lot more fun.

Nite Owl, therefore, looks like a knockoff (movie) Batman—which actually works out fine, since Nite Owl is so clearly based on Batman. Both Silk Spectres look less distinctive, and more like every sexy leather-clad heroine from other movies.

Overall, the movie has a quite slick look to it, perhaps too slick given the somewhat run-down atmosphere of the original. I don’t think that’s critical on its own.

What it will really come down to, I think, is whether they screw with the plot (I get the impression they haven’t much) and whether they take the darkness or complexity out of the characters—especially The Comedian, Rorschach, and Ozymandias. If they make Ozymandias more like a typical villain, or the other two more heroic, it will alter the dynamics of the story quite badly.

I don’t like what I see of Ozymandias from the trailer; Matthew Goode looks a little too English-public-school (which probably isn’t that far off from Adrian Veidt, but somehow seems irksome), and (again) the costuming seems off—making him appear mostly in black gives him a villainous cast that the comic book character wouldn’t countenance (he’d see it as interfering with his public image).

Despite these issues, the trailer has probably achieved its goal: it’s made me curious enough that I’ll probably go see the movie when it comes out next year. Look for complaints about it in this space when the time comes…

In some ways Obama would be better for us in the short run, just as Clinton was better than the elder Bush. In some ways his presidency could be much worse in the longer term, again like Clinton. For one thing, the recent outpouring of enthusiastic support from all quarters - including on black academic and professional list serves and blogs and on op-ed pages - for his attacks on black poor people underscores the likelihood that Obama will be even more successful than Clinton at selling punitive, regressive and frankly racist social policies as humane anti-poverty initiatives. In a way, I suppose, there could be something useful about having a large strain of the black petite bourgeoisie come out as a militant racial class for itself. Maybe that could be a prelude to a good fight, but unfortunately there’s no counterweight. And the black professional-managerial strata, despite their ever more blatant expressions of contempt for black poor people, continue to insist on speaking for the race as a whole.

While racism is a serious problem in the US, class is always close to the surface, and probably closer to the core of the problem. Obama doesn’t seem likely to tackle either, and looks like he might make both worse—although possibly not as much worse as McCain.

My morning pages are done on a computer, and the length minimum is 1000 words, as opposed to the handwritten, three pages suggestion in The Artist’s Way. I’m far more comfortable with my way of doing it, which is why I do it that way…

Conservatively, I’ve probably averaged three hundred and fifty thousand words per year. Probably more than that, but that means that I’ve now accumulated three and a half million words of morning pages. (The average novel is between sixty and one hundred thousand words, for comparison.) That strikes me as a scary amount of text.

It’s a completely ingrained habit now; the morning pages are simply part of what I do every day. They ceased being optional in any real sense many years ago, and I’m quite glad of that—I think they’ve been extremely good for me over the years, and have helped keep me grounded, even in those times when I haven’t been very grounded at all.

I’ve never really reviewed my pages, as The Artist’s Way suggests that you do, but I’m going to start now, re-reading the pages from ten years back each day before starting them (and also renaming and converting the format of the older ones that are named poorly and are in archaic formats).

So that’s the first ten years…

That’s quite a week, and it surprises me that it’s so bad, even from the guy who brought us this:

That should be fixed now. The most important article that people might have missed was probably the speech I gave at my father’s funeral, available for those who couldn’t make it in person.

Federer’s current points lead over Nadal is 545 points going into the start of the hard court season—which Federer has traditionally dominated. Now, with the gap between the two so small, even if you assume that Federer will win the US Open (and he’s still who I’d bet on), you have to think that Nadal might well make the final, or at least the semi-finals, cutting the points lead from Flushing Meadows significantly. Nadal will drop the 250 points from Stuttgart, which he’s skipping, but even so it’s clear that the run-up to the US Open is going to be incredibly important for the two of them as they tussle for the number one spot.

In some respects Federer is at a disadvantage, because he’s defending more points—he won Cincinnati and was a finalist in Toronto last year, a total of 850 points. Nadal loses the points from Stuttgart, but is only defending 450 from Cincinnati and Toronto. So effectively, if you throw out those points entirely, Federer is at 5750 going into those, whereas Nadal is 5355—a lead of only 395. A bad result for either of them at either of those tournaments could determine the ranking, and it’s certainly the case that the US Open will be incredibly important ranking-wise.

Incidentally, while it’s clearly a hugely important moment, especially for Nadal, I don’t think that the Wimbledon loss represents the end of the Federer era. I still think Federer is the favorite for Wimbledon next year, for example. I don’t think that the loss to Nadal represents any display of vulnerability for Federer in real terms, either—I can’t imagine any other player watching that match and thinking “I could do that” regarding Nadal’s performance.

If Federer loses the number one ranking, that will be the end of an era (he’s been number one for a record 232 weeks), although perhaps less so if he somehow loses it while winning the US Open and the Tennis Master’s Cup. In my mind, though, the Federer era, the truly dominant part of it, will only be over when he fails to get to at least the semifinals of a Grand Slam—he’s been to the last seventeen of them. That seventeen (and counting) is a record, and furthermore, during that streak, while winnning ten of the Slams, he has also only ever lost to the eventual winner, which is quite ridiculous. That level of consistent world-class tennis is unparalleled, and only when that fades will Federer really no longer be in the prime of his career.

Oh, and: Novak who?

I didn’t start watching it until the end of the first set, when Federer couldn’t quite break Nadal to get back on track, but was looking like the stronger of the two players. When he was four-one up in the second set, I thought that would be it, that he’d serve out the set and then take over, as he has so many times in the past. But he lost his concentration somehow, and Nadal broke him not once but twice, winning five games in a row to take a two-set lead.

I still didn’t think Federer would lose, however. I thought that he was the better player overall, and that if he could avoid lapses for the rest of the match, he’d win.

He was the better player throughout the third set, and I expected him to win the tiebreak. He did, seven-five—including a ridiculous four aces. At that point, I thought he’d crack Nadal, that he just needed to get a set and then would do what needed to be done.

Incidentally, I don’t think that the rain delay in the third set helped him particularly. I thought that even before it, even despite losing the second set, he was poised to take over the match.

In the fourth, however, I started to wonder. Nadal threatened constantly, perhaps because he served first in that set and had Federer in sudden death situations at four-five and five-six. Psychologically, I thought Nadal was ascendant.

Federer held him off to bring it to six-all, fourth set. Federer won the first point, and I thought he’d shift up a gear and ace Nadal out. He didn’t, and Nadal took two minibreaks to go up. He then kept on going, and made it to five-two. At that point, I really thought it was all over.

But Nadal tightened up slightly, and that’s all it took for Federer to get right back into it, erasing the minibreaks and bringing it back on serve.

Federer had set point at five-six, but Nadal saved it. The play at this point was unbelievable, and this was probably the highest-quality point of the match, exemplified by two critical points. Federer, serving at seven-seven, hit a fantastic forehand into the corner and followed it into the net. It looked like Nadal might not even reach it—certainly no other player apart perhaps from Federer himself would have—and Nadal somehow generated an unbelievable passing shot down the line, blowing it right by Federer, to set up match point.

Nadal was serving at eight-seven, and this time he hit a deep approach shot to Federer’s backhand, and covered the net. Federer, on the run and way out wide, hit a superb shot that came in from outside the court and landed in the corner to save championship point. Eight-eight, and then Federer won the next two to take the fourth set.

Now Nadal did start to look a little shaky, but Federer couldn’t quite break through. I thought Nadal also started to look tired. Still, he reached deuce on Federer’s serve at two-two—and then they suspended play due to rain.

When they came back, Federer served out his game, and they fought on, Federer coming back from fifteen-forty down twice—except that the second time, he couldn’t get out of the game. He got back to deuce, but Nadal’s returns kept landing near the line, and Nadal broke for eight-seven. That was it. I didn’t think Federer could come back, and he didn’t, although I was surprised that he dumped a forehand into the net on match point. He’d fought off another championship point (or two?) already, but finally made a mistake at the wrong time, and Nadal took it.

I think the rain delay in the fifth helped Nadal quite a lot, gave him time to calm down after losing that tiebreak in the fourth, and also helped him rest physically—while many consider Nadal the fitter player, and that might be true in absolute terms, it doesn’t take into account the fact that Federer simply uses less energy to play tennis, due to the fanatastic economy of his movement and strokes. I do think that Nadal was tiring first.

It really was unbelievably good tennis throughout. Nadal was steadier, I think, while Federer was more up and down—and when he’s up, he’s still better than Nadal on grass. When he’s down, he’s only barely worse. That was enough for Rafael Nadal, the first man since Borg to win both the French and Wimbledon in the same year, and the winner of the best tennis match I’ve ever seen.

Many commenters seem to think that the crux of the issue is whether or not the BBers have the “right” to remove the posts. They have that right, obviously. I think the issue is more precisely what it means for them to do something like that.

First off, it’s complicated by the fact that it’s a group blog, while the posts and the removal were both by Xeni Jardin, so the rest of the BoingBoingers are in a tricky spot—how can you tell someone else that they can’t take down articles that they’ve written?

It’s also more complicated for Xeni because it’s a group blog—much of the criticism has been aimed at BoingBoing as a whole, and not at Xeni specifically, and people have contrasted the removal of the posts with attitudes expressed by Cory and Mark. I get the impression that she was thinking only about her position vis-a-vis Violet Blue, and not about BoingBoing’s collective credibility, when she did it.

This was a private spat that has become very public, and as such touches on celebrity and privacy. Xeni isn’t a celebrity in the common sense of the term, but she’s certainly a public figure in the online world, and (as the interest in this issue demonstrates) conflicts in that world are definitely intriguing to lots of people.

The crux of the matter is probably close to what Xeni references in the LA Times piece:

[Xeni's father] paint[ed] very beautiful photorealistic portraits of nude women. Sometimes he went off into experimental territory that he was embarrassed about… sometimes he would just grab batches of the stuff that was crappy as years went on, and go to the backyard and burn it. And it wasn’t that he was censoring himself, and God knows nobody else was censoring him. It was that this was his creative work. This was art. And he felt like some of it wasn’t representative of who he was anymore and he didn’t want it to be available to the world to see.

—Los Angeles Times, BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin on unpublishing the Violet Blue posts

The question isn’t whether blog posts are art, but what the creator’s prerogatives are once something has been released into the public sphere. Personally speaking, I don’t think I’d do what Xeni’s father did, because I would perceive it as revisionism and denial—but that is definitely a personal feeling, and certainly people are entitled to keep their own works completely private. However, once they’re made public, it’s a different story. Publication means an addition to the larger culture, and just as once the reader gets ahold of a work their interpretation can carry as much weight as the creator’s, so the cultural sphere has a claim on any works released into it. Deleting works out there is cultural revisionism.

There is another point, however. It’s a blog, a website, and what if you don’t look at the posts as articles per se, as the online equivalent of magazine stories? Regarding the posts as articles more or less leads you to conclude that removing them is a kind of violation… but if you instead regard the provision of the posts as a service, the conclusion is entirely different. A service is ongoing, and must be maintained. Some energy or effort is required to continue it. What morality requires any creator to keep their services on tap? Why should Xeni, or anyone else, be bound to expending effort in order to continue serving articles they no longer deem worthy?

The BoingBoingers themselves seem to be taking another tack, considering posts to be both articles and services building that most commonplace of Internet buzzwords, community. That’s much more nebulous, of course, and the demands of a community may or may not respect creative control, or the effort required to maintain services.

Points are the individual exchanges ending when one player can’t reach a shot or hits an illegal shot. In a sense, what constitutes a “point” here is irrelevant to the scoring system, which just requires that points can be scored in some fashion. Tennis games are played to four points, but the point scores (for unclear historical reasons) are, instead of 0,1,2,3, “love”, “fifteen”, “thirty”, and “forty”. If you score the fourth point and are two points ahead of your opponent, you win the game. Games must be won by at least two points—that is, if you’re tied with your opponent, you need to score two points consecutively in order to win. If both players reach “forty”, the score is called “deuce” (not “forty-forty”, or “deuce-deuce”), and when one player wins the next point, the score is “advantage “. The the player whose advantage it is wins the next point, they win the game. If not, the score returns to deuce. This can mean that the score returns to deuce many times before one player manages two consecutive points.

In tennis, players alternave serving each game.

After games come sets. A set is first-to-six-games, but players must win by two games—hence six-five is not a set-winning score, while six-four is. In the past, sets would continue until a player gained a two-game advantage, but modern tournaments use a tiebreak if both players reach six games (except in the final set of matches, mostly). The tiebreak is played to seven points, with players alternating serve after the first point and after every two points thereafter. A player must win by two points.

Matches are usually played best of three or five sets.

The first thing I love about the scoring system is the insistence on winning by two. I think that adds a tremendous amount to it, and helps a great deal in dminishing the impact of luck.

The second thing I love is the compartmentalization. Each game is truly that, a game in itself, in which both players start at nothing and must win. A player leading a set five games to love must still win another game, meaning the opponent can regroup, steel themselves, and attempt to fight hard for each game, while knowing that losing a single point in that game won’t doom them. There is a profound difference between that structure and, say, a system in which players alternated serve every four points and had to reach twenty-four to win a set. In that scenario, a player might be down twenty to five, say, and would be required to make an impossibly low number of mistakes in order to recover. With the tennis system, the breakdown into individual games gives them an outside chance.

The compartmentalization applies to sets, too—after a set is done, the next one starts with both players at zero. Many games use a set-based structure in which this is true, but don’t have the additional intermediary level of games between points and sets.

The scoring system therefore allows for a lot of ebb and flow, and for a great degree of psychological depth, one reason why tight tennis matches often have an epic quality.

When the ruling body for table tennis restructured its scoring system earlier this decade, changing games from first-to-twenty-one to first-to-eleven, I think they should have gone in the other direction, and used the tennis scoring system instead. There’s no way they would have, since they were looking to shorten the matches, not lengthen them, and table tennis using the tennis scoring system would probably take as long as tennis. They could have played to a single set, or best-of-three, but it would still have been longer than what they were looking for. Table tennis started as a parlor game, not a sport, so it’s expected to be a lot shorter than something like tennis, but I think that’s a shame, and would be quite interested in what would happen to the sport if they switched to the tennis system.

I often play Magic: The Gathering in sets, rather than as the best of three games, having come across the suggestion in a Mike Flores article some time ago. It makes a lot of sense. You can sideboard after four games, and apart from that, it’s just like a tennis set where an individual MTG game is the game unit (points are an irrelevant concept for MTG here). No tiebreak, though, but I think the longest set I’ve played ended up being eight-six. I’ve followed the tradtional MTG approach of giving the loser of the last game the choice of going first or second, but I think that I should try it with that choice alternating strictly, just as serve does in tennis.

I think that FPS deathmatch games would also benefit from trying the tennis system, counting each frag as a point and equating “serve” with “choice of map”—that would make for a completely different style of game, and I think the results could be really interesting.

Squash, racquetball, and badminton could of course use it as well, and again the main issue would be the amount of time it took to play the games. A big difference for some of those would be the ability of the non-serving player to score points, but the advantage of serving entire games would mean that the serve retained its importance.

Essentially, I don’t see why all individual sports/games don’t use that scoring system where they could…