Intellivision
Rumor has it, as Adele said, that Apple is on the cusp of foisting upon the world a big-screen iMac that the world will call a television set, but its relationship with what we all think of as a television set is akin to what we’re all doing with television now.
“Television” used to refer to the set, and the things we would watch on the set which were supplied by television networks who provided the programming you couldn’t control supported by product advertising you hated for things you didn’t want. You would watch “television” when you got home. It was a thing you did based on someone else’s schedule and you had to wait a week to see things you wanted to see, and waste time on the things you didn’t, like Everybody Loves Raymond and CSI Miami.
Television, unless you weren’t paying attention and/or still believe you need to sit in front of the screen and wait until it shows you something interesting, no longer exists – or, more accurately, only exists if you want it to. Television isn’t a thing like that, but the programs and entertainment are all still out there somewhere, only now you kind of have to find them.
For an example, the BBC One is currently running series two of its Upstairs, Downstairs reboot each Sunday evening. It’s their answer to the Downton Juggernaut based on a classic series from when no one now alive was alive, and will be appearing on American television in some month’s time. In terms of “classic TV,” that means waiting until Masterpiece Theater shows it on PBS, and you can drink your milky tea and eat biscuits while pretending your own posh upbringing.
To me, that means opening up a Usenet client and searching for Upstairs Downstairs and downloading a multipart file that compiles on my iMac so I can watch the .avi multi-channel audio file using MPlayerX. I see it less than a day after it has aired several thousands of miles away from me on a network that I have absolutely no way of receiving.
This, then, is “television.”
I think Apple knows this, because I think this is how Apple wants us to watch “television.” Not according to someone else’s schedule and not crammed with programs we have no desire to watch. Instead, we watch what we want, when we want, as much as we want. And “television” is a screen that includes an agent that searches for and remembers the things you want to watch, and saves them until you watch them.
But – and this is a big but – Apple cannot simply make it easier for you and me to go find these programs, which cost a lot of money to produce and broadcast, without somehow compensating the producers, can they?
Apple’s TV is, I think, two things. First, a well-designed piece of hardware. That much is certain. That’s what they make. Hardware, that’s well-designed inside and out, streamlined and simple and looks nice sitting in your living space.
Second, it’s finding the things you want to entertain you, and making it easy to subscribe to them or rent them or buy them, sans advertising you do not want. It means buying a season of True Blood from HBO, and watching at your leisure. Or buying a game without buying a plastic case and instructions you never look at anyway. And buying My Week With Marilyn from The Weinstein Company complete with interactive historical footage about the movie on which the movie is based, The Prince & The Showgirl. And buying the Super Bowl from the NFL. And the World Series from the MLB. And the World Cup from FIFA.
On your TV.
All the things you use your TV for, all the things you watch or play – or even when you want to use the screen as a computer monitor for its built-in computer – will be arrayed for you using a simple menu that allows you to sort your entertainments by date, or unwatched, or length, or title, or category, or whatever. Whatever you’re in the mood for right now, and for however long you want to do it. It will know all, see all, remember all.
You don’t really care, do you, what the screen is. It’s Apple, so it’ll be very good, if not the best, screen there is. The hardware part, that is. The glass and silicon and metal bits. You don’t care, as long as it looks good. And it will.
No, what you care about is how it handles all the stuff. The episodes and movies and games and apps. How it knows what you want, because it’s a Genius. How it remembers what you were watching yesterday.
And one more thing. You’re paying for your entertainments, of course. And you’re okay with that, because now you’re only getting what you want to want, and not what the cable companies and networks tell you that you want. The one more thing is that you’re willing to share your viewing habits with those people. And the reason you’re willing to do that is that it kills – absolutely kills – the notion of Nielsen ratings. No more will one family living in Ohio determine what you want to watch. Everyone’s viewing habits can be accessed and spreadsheeted and picked apart, and suddenly (hopefully) quality starts to win.
It’s coming. It really is. Because if anyone can do this, Apple can. And once the suppliers start supplying programs for the Apple television, they’ll do it for Samsung and Sony (who already makes their own entertainment and games) and Toshiba and Panasonic. If you don’t want a big iMac running iOS in your living room, that’s okay, too. All you need is a hard drive and an interface and a store that sells you these programs. Apple already has that, of course, but the others can follow suit.
The networks are already dying, and they know it. Just broadcasting stuff is no longer a viable business. Controlling the product is what’s important. As Bravo TV says, watch what happens.
February 27, 2012 Leave a comment
The Defensive Marriage Act
The Los Angeles Times is this week publishing opinions from far-right and far-left voices explaining why they feel they cannot talk to their opposites. Today’s conversation, conducted between the parties via email, is about the same-sex marriage debate.
Though I would admit that I would side with the liberal view and make many of the same arguments about the silliness of defending the right of the government and, I must assume, the “majority of the people” to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, I think the debate falls short by concluding too quickly without making one salient argument against the conservative’s view that marriage can not and should not be “radically redefined” to include man and man or woman and woman in addition to man and woman.
The conservative voice makes a loud argument about her definition of what marriage is and has always been:
Marriage reflects male and female sexual union and the complementary natures of males and females. Since male and female sexual unions are procreative by nature (if not always procreative in effect), marriage is the social recognition of that union, and the vows of fidelity that accompany it are supposed to guarantee that the children of that union know who their biological parents are and are raised and supported by them. This is something that every human society has recognized since time began, long before there were any laws regulating marriage.
I actually have no argument with that at all. If that is all that marriage is, I’m perfectly happy to allow marriage to be that.
And only that.
The problem is that marriage, as it is defined today in the U.S. and regardless of how it has been historically defined or considered, also includes several governmental issues concerning the rights, both legal and financial, of the partner.
So here’s me counter-proposal to the loud and obnoxious minority of voices scared shitless that a marriage between a loving couple that also happens to be homosexual in nature allow another amendment to the constitution that defines marriage as precisely what is listed above, stripped entirely of any other legal ramifications of the union.
In other words, if their main objection is that marriage, as an institution, may only be used to describe heterosexual unions, marriage must also preclude any other definitions including those concerning taxation, or access to loved ones in hospitals, and insurance or veterans benefits, and so on.
In addition, since marriage is only the union of a man and a woman, homosexual unions may certainly be called something else but must also contain exactly the same governmental issues concerning all those rights that are currently legally denied to partners in a same-sex union.
I’m perfectly willing to allow marriage, as a term or a word or what have you, to be something that only occurs between one man and one woman.
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) has nothing at all to do with defending marriage, it’s about defending the legal definition of marriage.
Section 2. Powers reserved to the states: No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.
Section 3. Definition of marriage: In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.
Note, please, that Section 2 of DOMA is very specific about how the laws of the states in regards to rights given to married individuals are not to include anyone in a same-sex partnership. This has nothing whatsoever to do with procreation or children or parenting, and only about legal rights.
Section 3, similarly, limits federal laws concerning those rights, and that they only apply to opposite-sex unions and never ever in a million years to people joined in love who happen to be gay.
What we want – all us homos and lesbos – is legal recognition of the same rights as our straight counterparts when they elect to join into a union. They can continue to call that marriage, as far as I’m concerned. Change DOMA to strip all legal rights that apply to straight partners and I’ll be tickled pink to allow marriage to continue to be owned by the conservatives who seem so concerned about its definition.
But if the real reason they want to deny same-sex couples legal marriage is to deny same-sex couples the legal rights, they should damn well stand up and say it. Because that means they think one set of people should be treated differently than another set of people based upon their sexuality.
And that, in itself, is discrimination.
February 20, 2012 Leave a comment
A Thing About Apple by Someone Who Doesn’t Know Anything About Apple
The largest company in the world announced that they would be releasing a new operating system update this summer, and one that more effectively married their mobile OS with their desktop OS to the extent that it will track and keep everything you’re doing in their half-a-million square-foot server farm in North Carolina, protected by your single login that also has financial access for you to purchase more music, movies, TV shows, “apps” and computer hardware via the Apple Store.
This is not meant to be some alarmist call to arms, it is merely a statement of fact. If you use Apple computer and entertainment hardware, you’re using Apple services to keep track of everything, as well as potentially house everything on Apple’s online servers. And Mountain Lion, as Apple calls its OS X update to 10.8, intensifies and increases that reliance to an extent potentially much deeper and stronger than the relationship that you have with any other vendor.
I’ve seen some equate this on-going evolution as an attempt by Apple to develop its own social network. It is not, because it differs in a very special way with the first and foremost goal of a social network, being that services like Facebook want you to share your everything with them and with everyone else, while Apple is only seemingly interested in getting you to share your everything just with them.
Why are they interested in doing that?
First thing that comes to my head is benign. They just want to, as a business, try to ensure that you’re fully invested in their hardware and services, and a very good way of doing that is to offer to keep all your stuff tied to an account they control. You log in to your Apple account with your Apple ID and then elect to allow them to store your stuff for you for nothing. If you want to use iTunes Match (and, hey, Apple, when are you renaming that little feature, anyway?) you pay an additional fee, but that’s primarily (or so one thinks) so that Apple can recompense the artists whose music you are holding a small fee for holding it. So, hey, nice, I’ll do that, I like artists and musicians and they deserve to get paid for the stuff they make that I like.
But everything else up in the iCloud is yours, and therefore you. Your documents, your contacts, your bookmarks, your games, your scores, your music, your movies, your TV shows – virtually anything and everything that can be digitized, as well as the records of your usage of said digitized data – it’s all up there in Apple’s Cloud.
How I feel about it is this:
Privacy is overrated.
I don’t think we have privacy now, we have the illusion of privacy. What, you don’t think your government is already tracking your whereabouts? Safeway isn’t tracking your spending habits? Google doesn’t know what porn you like by type and frequency? Your car is keeping track of your driving, and how fast, and how far, and where you go so if and when something happens, your car can tell the police. Your phone is constantly telling your phone company about you. And so on, and so forth. You may choose to turn a blind eye towards it, but you know it’s happening.
My P.O.V. on this whole thing is, “So what?”
And the reason I say this is somewhat personal. I think that our secrets destroy us. Both as individuals and as a society. And I base this on being a gay man in a society that would sometimes/often prefer to ignore that about me, or prefer that I shut up about it, so that it can continue to judge me.
Oops, I went there and this was only going to be a thing about Mountain Lion.
Okay, deep breath, regroup, rewind, back it up to the cloud, start again.
For whatever reason, and I have nothing whatever to back this up with facts or numbers, I feel okay about handing Apple these reins even though I’ve made a very direct and cognizant decision that I feel exactly the opposite way about Facebook and Google, though perhaps it is because Apple isn’t interested in broadcasting my facts and figures in the same way I believe Facebook and Google are.
Because they are.
And another thing.
The other thing of (partial, glancing) interest is the retitling of everything from an iThing to a Thing. iCal is Calendar. iChat is Messages. This makes perfect sense as it’s kind of silly/stupid to brand utilities like contact lists and calendars. It isn’t as if you’re doing something extra-ispecial in an iCal that you can’t do in a Calendar, particularly when the experience still sucks so badly.
Honestly, if anyone at Apple is reading this, please for the love of everything holy fix your fucking calendar app. I am so, so, so, so tired of clicking on a date and having the frustrating experiencing of not actually beng able to do anything until I re-click on the date after I’ve already attempted unsuccessfully to add a new appointment. That thing sucks.
Other than that, I’m meh about Mountain Lion. I assume it’ll be another cheap update (particularly after having to spend $90 to get a Windows license for my Bootcamp instance even though I only use my Windows 7 system once on this computer, but the stupid Microsoft servers don’t know the difference.
Oh! And if you’re even considering leaving the world of Apple because you don’t want them all up in your face with Cloud-based services hovering over your shoulder, I urge you to go fire up Windows 7 just once and not start crying like Cinderella’s stepmother when she realizes just how ugly and worthless her operating system is.
That is all.
February 16, 2012 Leave a comment
The F Word
Hi. How have you been? What’s up? Seen Avatar, yet? Pretty, wasn’t it? Though it left me feeling headachey and kind of worried that we’re going to be subjected to multi-million-dollar animated movies starring people who look like puppets, which isn’t too far from what we have now, only with less emotion.
Right, then. There’s that out of the way. Small talk was never my forte and I don’t really do a good job of moving it along, and anyway the reason I’m publishing something for the first time in over a year is hardly because I have very strong feelings about the crap that Hollywood produces because I’ll always have Turner Classic Movies to turn to so I can cleanse my palette and watch something completely drained of color and filled with actual actors actually acting.
No, what I’ve come here today to discuss is the state of the U.S. in terms of the changing attitudes concerning “the homosexual lifestyle” and my disgust, annoyance, frustration and anger about it all. Because “things are getting better,” for sure, but the environment of tolerance and the open dialogs about the rights of individuals to be who they are and enjoy the same rights under the law as others do has also opened up this fresh can of ugly worms – and the fall-out resulting from the can opening and my own reactions and digestion of the resulting tide of scorn and derision and open prejudice that it has taken me until now to finally understand.
February 3, 2010 Leave a comment
Resolved: No More God Pretending
As a gay atheist (gaytheist?), I’ve made my share of compromises in life. Just to get through the day-to-day, you know. It’s simply easier for me to play a game or portray a desire I don’t feel or pretend a holy devotion over a meal or during a wedding, bowing my head and lip-synching to Biblical passages and even softly saying an “Amen” at the end of a prayer to a God or Savior I don’t believe exists.
I’ve been able to stop pretending to heterosexual desires over the last few years. When I’m not in San Francisco or among friends, I still have to remind myself that even looking too closely at a man I might find attractive could result in physical harm, though the chances of that actually happening are very much diminished now that I favor travel to major cities rather than rural townships where cosmopolitan (modern) thinking isn’t widely practiced. I’m not about to start prancing around in heels and a wig and screaming for equal rights, and not because I think there’s anything wrong with that but because heels are extremely uncomfortable and I have no need of a wig — frankly, I have too much hair as it is.
But the other part of my life that sometimes requires disguising, the part where I try to “fit in” with Christians, mostly, but also the occasional Jew or Muslim or Hindu — though I must admit that the latter mingling usually only involves eating regional foods rather than finding myself at prayer with them — the part where I bow my head in prayer and all that? I’m done with it. I’m done pretending. I’m out of the closet.
I am openly atheist.
December 3, 2008 8 Comments
Democratic Reform
This is not another rant about Proposition 8, per se, though it does necessarily encompass the arguments for and against it, as well as pretty much every Presidential election over the past 20 years or so, and any legislation at a local, state or federal level.
I often hear that “we live in a democracy!” and that “the majority rules!” and that “in our democratic form of government, it’s one person – one vote!” These are phrases used in arguments to assail those that may be in the minority, or who think that in the United States, laws are always passed by the popular vote and depend on getting a majority, however slim, and that’s that. End game. No more discussion.
Friends, we do not live in a democracy and we have never lived in a democracy. The United States is a democratic republic. We rarely do anything based on one person – one vote, which would be true in a democracy. In that case, we would have no need for a congress, or a state assembly, or a town council, or a house of representatives because everything would require a vote of the people to pass.
In a democratic republic, we elect officials to speak for us. We have a representative democracy. We elect the people we believe will best represent our interests or opinions and send them to these other voting bodies and they make the laws for us. We elect the judges who interpret the constitution of our state or country, or we elect the person who appoints those judges. We don’t vote on what is constitutional. We elect other people — who are hopefully better educated and more familiar with those documents — to make those judgements.
A republic is any government that is not lead by a hereditary monarch or dictator or Pope, for example. A republic is a government (like ours) in which the people, or a part of the people, have a say in the government. Things are not decided by fiat, they are put to a vote, even if that vote is not by the general population but by their elected representatives.
So whenever someone’s argument comes down to “it was elected on by popular vote because we live in a democracy!” you are allowed to roll your eyes and smirk and feel slightly superior because you know the truth. This is also why the president is not elected by popular vote, but by the electoral college. You’re not voting for the president, you’re voting for someone who will vote for the president you told them to. The electors are technically free to vote for anyone they want to, so this is why Barack Obama will not actually be voted in as President Elect until December 15th, when the electors meet to cast their votes on our behalf for the next president of the United States, which will presumably be Barack Obama.
We do not live in a democracy. We live in a representative democracy. We live in a democratic republic.
November 12, 2008 1 Comment
The Voices of the Peoples
After Proposition 8, which attempts to inserts a phrase that defines marriage as only between one man and one woman into our state Constitution, passed here in California, my initial reaction was that it was inevitable.
Even though, only weeks before election day, defeat of the anti-gay marriage was as much as 19 points ahead in some polls, by the day of the election the decision was neck-and-neck, and even though California is often depicted as some insane liberal haven filled with wackos, deviants and drug abusers, that really only applies to us here in San Francisco, and more particularly Berkeley. The Yes on 8 bandwagon was bound to gain steam and roll over those of us who were hoping that maybe this time logic would prevail over fear and prejudice, though I, personally, had faith in the tendency of the electorate to say one thing to pollsters, but vote differently once they were in the privacy of the ballot box.
You might tell a stranger who wants to publish your opinion that you’re in favor of freedom and justice for all, but when you’re all alone and it’s time to stamp the ballot, it’s easy to just be yourself. And my faith in the darker nature of us all has not been diminished.
Not long after it became clear that Prop. 8 was going to pass, opponents representing my rights took their case to court in an attempt to overturn and throw out the vote. Frankly, I’m against that tactic. For one thing, they only did that after the vote didn’t go our way. If it really was an illegal proposition, why didn’t they do something like that before the vote? Was it because everyone thought it would be defeated? I also think that, as much as I hate to admit it, the proponents have a point. This has been voted on twice now, and each time the majority spoke. If we’re going to get our rights, I’d prefer to do it in an environment where we’re not constantly under legal threat to have them removed all over again. Not that defeat of Prop. 8 necessarily meant that they wouldn’t get another million signatures in two year’s time and try it again, but if the population of California had voted against it this time, perhaps another proposition would have been harder to come by.
Maybe California, and certainly the rest of the nation (with the exception of Massachusetts) isn’t ready to provide equal rights to every citizen. Apparently, the idea of marriage is chockablock with too many minefields. This particular legal contract, it’s too darned… oh what’s the word? Sacred! Too darned sacred to too much of the population to allow anyone other than “one man and one woman” to be married, and that definition is, according to public comments I read at CNN and elsewhere, thousands of years old. Even as old as mankind itself! Older than, like, anything! And changing it will result in several really horrible things that will destroy all of society, even us gays who don’t know what we’re toying with.
So I’ve decided to try to meet some of those doubts and fears head-on. I’ve taken the liberty of copying verbatim some of the comments in support of Prop. 8 that concerned citizens left in various articles about the subject at CNN.com, and I’d like to address them one by one.
November 10, 2008 6 Comments
Straight to the Point
How to tell if you’re straight, and what you can do to hide it from others.
With the recent decision by California to strip straight couples of their Constitutional right to marriage — a decision already echoed in one way or another by 29 other states, including Georgia
I know you may be feeling depressed right now, but please believe that not all of us gay people think you’re entirely sick, depraved, abnormal and not deserving of love. After all, marriage is almost exactly the same as a civil union, accept for some of the things about next of kin and so forth, but since you so rarely stay with your partners for more than a few years and insist on fooling around so much, does that really matter? And this was in no way a referendum on legitimizing prejudice or discrimination with an attempt to place these definitions into the state constitution. We don’t hate you.
We just think you’re not entitled to the same rights as us. I mean, really, how can you possibly argue with that while you’re cheating on your spouses and wearing those outlandish clothes?
November 5, 2008 3 Comments
Sex, Lies and Proposition 8
I know I’m late to the party but on the eve of the election and with the strong possibility that Proposition 8 here in California will remove the right to marry whom I may wish to marry (something I never considered possible and merely accepted as another impossibility because I am gay and therefore less fortunate in terms of rights than others who pay taxes just like I do) I would just like to point out a few things to anyone considering voting in favor of Prop. 8 because you’re scared that allowing us gays to marry will ruin civilization forever and make children into monstrous sexual deviants.
- A domestic partnership is not the same as marriage. If it is the same as marriage, I would like to propose that we do away with marriage entirely and only have domestic partnerships. Now, feel the same way about domestic partnerships?
- I am not in a “lifestyle choice.” I am gay. Choice had no point in my life, and if there was a choice it came very late in life and it was to finally like myself and stop believing I was the horrible person others believed me to be.
- A yes vote on Prop. 8 removes rights, it doesn’t define them.
- I don’t think this has anything to do with race or the fact that California used to deny other people the right to marriage based on skin color. This is about me and my rights, and the desire by some to strip me of them. Because I am gay.
- Maybe your yes vote doesn’t mean you hate me. It only feels that way to me.
It’s weird to me that this is happening at all. I never would have believed there would ever be a question about equal rights for homosexuals on a state ballot during my lifetime. I always sort of expected and accepted that I would forever be a second-class citizen because I came out of the closet at last and managed at last to accept myself, never believing that everyone/anyone else would.
But here we are. And here it is.
Please, if anything I ever wrote, said, made or designed had a positive effect on you or someone you know, if you know anyone else who is gay, or if you understand that everyone should be treated the same way when it comes to questions of love and happiness, vote no tomorrow on Proposition 8.
Please. Vote no.
November 3, 2008 4 Comments
Serendipity by Proxy
I’m surprised that anyone anywhere thinks they can do anything they want to with something they “found” on the web and not have anyone else anywhere notice that they did it. Frankly, if the web has done anything besides remind us all that there is someone else out there with the same sexual deviance as you, it is the inevitability of the documentation of every fucking thing all the fucking time.
Take, for example, the Case of the Expensive T-shirt Designer That Didn’t Bother to Do His or Her Proper Research Regarding the Origin of the Particular Flickr Account Owner of the Image They Thought They Could Simply Borrow-Slash-Steal for Part of the Graphic on One of Their Over-Priced Garments Except That They Had No Right to Do So and Then They Got Caught by the Originator’s Boyfriend.
Deepak Chopra may consider that there’s no such thing as coincidence, in which case God has a fucking great sense of humor and suddenly a lot of the crap I put up with on a daily basis makes a little more sense when considered in relation to the fact that a lot of it is done in the name of God and there isn’t one, but the sequence of events that had to conspire together to lead up to what ended up happening during my recent trip to New York City are just slim enough when taken one at a time and incredibly odd when combined together to make me reconsider my opinion about fate.
And, yes, if you think I’m going to abandon my love for run-on sentences at some point in the future on this, my blog, then you’re as insane as Deepak Chopra, though probably a lot less financially well off, so maybe you should shut up about how dumb he is or how annoying I am and write your own damn series of books about how other people should live. Go, you.
October 29, 2008 Leave a comment