Fugu Talk

Some friends of mine worked on this teaser, which is entered in a contest based on the number of five-star ratings. So if you’re inclined to give this five stars, go for it!

Over a recent dinner with friends I observed that some films could have been made by anyone but more often you can tell the filmmaker (or conglomeration of directors-writers-producers) is white. They resemble the usual pop-fiction novels where apparently the characters are by default white because the race of every non-white character is loudly announced (typically there’s a tough African-American who jokes about being the only African-American).

Unfortunately some of my favorite films and TV shows suffer from WWS (White Writer’s Syndrome). Looking at Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s town of Sunnydale you might think California has no Latinos or Asians (but they do have lots of vampires). Veronica Mars’ town of Neptune did have plenty of Latinos – in a gang. Both shows looked like they made a self-conscious effort to diversify a little in ensuing seasons, but I still can’t get over Joss Whedon’s vision of the future in Firefly, in which the cosmos was split among the remnants of the Chinese and American empires and all the characters you see curse cheerfully in Chinese, and there’s nary an Asian face in sight. It’s the isn’t-Asian-culture-cool esthetic evident in Blade Runner – future LA is suffused with Asian culture in the form of video geisha billboards and Chinese vendors and cyclists in coolie hats, but the main players are Caucasians who look they like fell out of a noir movie.

Of course, if you want to see an LA with Asian influence, you could just look around now. There’s Thai Town, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Monterey Park, and Asian-Americans like me who live in the burbs, speak English and the most foreign clothing I wear are Hawaiian shirts. This reminds me of my reaction when I watched Dark Angel. It was a bit more diverse than your average show, but with one sassy black character and one Jamaican black character and hardly an Asian in all of Seattle (except Chinatown, of course), I wasn’t surprised when I heard on the DVD commentary that this diversity (including the multi-racial Jessica Alba) was the show creators’ vision of an ethnically diverse future Seattle. I’m going to hazard a guess that you could look around Seattle now and get a better picture.

So far I’ve just been carping about old news, and I could bore the heck out of you (perhaps it’s too late) picking at every show that peeves me and praising the few that don’t (BSG, Eureka). But I find it interesting that animated casts, including the newer CG characters, aren’t faring better (with the exception of a few Disney films). Now, you can’t say you drew or modelled a virtual white character because no minorities applied. (at least virtual character don’t have to worry about the casting couch!) Recently, I finally got around to playing the first Drake’s Fortune game on my PS3. A good game with Indiana Jones type of story, featuring an all-white cast of protagonists ( a scoundrelly Latin-American nemesis). But if you view the behind-the-scene extras, you’ll see the development staff at Naughty Dog is a diverse bunch, more than you’ll likely see in any game or movie. Sometimes, it’d be nice if fantasy was more like real life.

This talk by Ed Catmull is pretty long for a YouTube video but I found every minute of it interesting – and I’m saying this as a person who routinely blanks out in meetings until someone looks at me and asks “what do you think?”

The only thing I might quibble with is that, while he mentions the mistakes of other companies like SGI and explains the culture and process at Pixar that attempts to avoid mistakes like that, it is unrealistic to expect other companies to change their personalities drastically. Just like people, companies can learn and get better at what they do, branch or move into related areas, but they each have their core competencies and basic attitudes.

I was employed at a few defense companies during the industry downturn of the early 90′s – many had fantasies of turning into commercial companies, but these were people and organizations that had never started a project without being paid in advance (nice work, if you can get it). Even the internal staff wouldn’t service an office workstation unless it was listed on a paid government contract. Development of new products in anticipation of revenue? Forget it. I “maintained” one software product by waiting for someone to order a copy, then we borrowed a workstation from another group, compiled it and shipped it. I hope it worked. Meanwhile, aggressive defense companies like SAIC that focused on their core business ate our lunch.

Mr. Catmull cited a couple of major mistakes made by SGI – acquiring Cray and not following through on a PC board. Maybe he’s right – if they’d put a serious effort into a PC board (I never even heard of it), perhaps they’d at least have dominated over other high-end PC-based graphics workstations like those from Intergraph. But anyone who thinks SGI could have been nVidia, forget it. SGI was toast long ago. This was a company that charged you a support contract for the privilege of sending in bug reports – not even sending them in, phoning them in. My company paid for a developer support contract and that group refused to accept bug reports – those had to go through the phone support line. SGI invented OpenGL but responded to our bug reports in the standard API by sending us a marketing team who tried to persuade us to rely on their proprietary API’s, which by the way varied among the three different OS’s running on their three different main platforms. This was a company that still had great engineers, but making $200 graphics boards was never going to happen (think how much they charged just for memory boards on the Indy) – their personality was geared entirely toward making money off high-priced graphics systems and they lasted for a while selling huge pieces of hardware to the likes of Disney. Maybe that’s why they bought Cray.

Mr. Catmull talks about how they threw out a straight-to-video Toy Story sequel project and started it from scratch as a real movie. This may be stretching the analogy a bit, but I’d venture to predict that if Pixar tried to get into the budget CG video business, it’d be a mess. It’s just not them.

I was fortunate to be interviewed as AppBoy’s Developer of the Week last week, but I was a bit startled to read the term “old school” applied to me (they meant it in a good way). I used to think of old school programmers as those guys who programmed in Fortran and COBOL or APL and remnisced about how they used to feed paper tape into computers.

But I guess there’s a whole generation of programmers now who haven’t seen what I’ve seen (do I sound like Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner?) Remember floppy discs? But most of the technology in use then is still around. I thought dot-matrix printers would be gone by now, but anywhere you see carbon copies (or the modern non-carbon equivalent – what do you call those?), there’s a noisy, slow dot-matrix printer. Just saw one in action at Jiffy Lube, today, when they printed out my receipt. Same with languages. I started out with BASIC in high school and then Lisp in college, and they’re still hanging around.

It’s probably easier to date me by listing what wasn’t in existence yet during my formative programming years. The Mac showed up by the time I went to college, but PC’s were still running DOS – Windows was a few years away (the first usable version, anyway). C had been around for a while but C++ was still a gleam in Bjorne’s eye. And forget about Java, .NET and the gazillion scripting languages that arrived during the Internet boom (Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby….)

And while there was an Internet before the boom, the main Internet applications were email, ftp and something called gopher. There was no web. No web browser. No online shopping, banking, reviewing, blogging, IM’ing, twittering, facebooking, linking in, googling, binging, yahooing, rediting, digging, stack-overflowing…how did I get anything done before the Web? Or maybe I should wonder, how am I getting anything done now?

Written on epinions, June 2003.

Software development is often compared to architecture, to the extent that “software architect” is a job title, and the now-common “design patterns” in use by the industry originated with a methodology developed by architect Christopher Alexander.

But as a career programmer, and on whimsical occasion an aspiring author, I’ve always thought that programming is more like writing. Aside from the obvious parallels in entering text and following syntax and grammar rules, good code is expressive, succinct and has style. And I have speculated that the organizational and structural challenges in developing large, complex programs are analogous to those posed by novel writing.

Now I feel validated after reading Terry Brook’s account of his creative process in Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life. In spite of the reference to magic, Brooks discourages the aspiring novelist from simply brainstorming some ideas and jumping into writing mode. Instead, he urges the writer to structure the work with an outline beforehand, paying particular attention to creating an incisive beginning and compelling end to the story.

As an exercise, he takes the reader through a sample story creation, explaining efficient and unobstrusive character development, noting subtleties such as the choice of character and place names. (The sample story features the protagonist Maud Manx and nemesis Feral Finch in a town called Octegenarian, Montana. OK, it’s not that subtle.)

In a novel-like fashion, Mr. Brooks frames this book with a relaxed yet compelling account of his writing life. His literary parents, childhood role-playing and early attempts at writing would seem to foretell of his eventual success, but he credits much of that to serendipity. Nearly thirty years ago, he happened to submit the right manuscript (The Sword of Shannara) to the right editor (Lester Del Rey) at the right time. (Del Rey wanted to prove that science fantasy was a viable genre)

Mr. Brook’s longstanding good relationships with his editors and publishers apparently limits the type of advice he can dispense – there are no examples of how to deal with difficult editors or even how to find a good agent. (He didn’t use an agent until negotiations on the novelization of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace) But his honest retelling of difficult choices made (abandoning his law career, starting over on a novel after writing 400 pages) reinforce his warnings and encouragement to those who feel they have the “magic”. And his experience with Hollywood (besides The Phantom Menace, he authored the book version of Hook) is downright hilarious.

I’m not a science fantasy reader and therefore I haven’t followed Mr. Brook’s bread-and-butter work. But his self-deprecating and easygoing style is delightful enough for me to consider reading his novels. (Even the Phantom Menace novelization. Maybe it’s better than the movie.)

Written on epinions, September 2003:

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to work on the voice-over script for a video game, which prompted me to dust off a copy of J. Michael Straczynski’s The Complete Book of Scriptwriting. I’ve had this book sitting around for several years (it was published in 1997) since I first moved to LA and caught the Hollywood bug.

Now, after countless hours of sitting in front of the TV and exclaiming, “I could write better dialogue than that!”, I have a better handle on the pragmatics of scriptwriting – the differences between TV and script formats, don’t submit entire unsolicited scripts (it won’t be opened for legal reasons), film pays better than television, and the importance of joining the WGA and getting an agent.

Straczynski doesn’t provide any convenient formulas for scriptwriting, but he does give some useful common-sense tips. Sound out the dialogue as you write – it might look great on paper but turn into a tongue-twister for the actor. Research your genre (in the case of TV, familiarize yourself with the series you want to write for). Start with an outline. Don’t set the pace too slow and thus lose the audience in the beginning.

This book is oriented largely toward television and film scriptwriting (the author was the creator of Babylon 5 and producer/writer on Murder She Wrote – I can’t wait to see the crossover episode). It begins with a history of the television and film industry that explains some of the current technological and business constraints that screen writers face, and ends with a sample episode script from Babylon 5.

But the author does include some treatment of playwriting and script writing for radio dramas and animation features. The latter is somewhat related to video game script writing – dialogue for animated characters must not rely on distinct “acting” such as gestures or facial movements. With the increasing number of video games produced with movie-like production values (some of them tied into actual movies), for example the Grand Theft Auto series and The Matrix, I hope Straczynski will include a chapter covering game script writing in his next update of this very useful book.

I haven’t seen Pixar’s Up, yet. I’ve heard rave recommendations for it, but this real-life story that took place here in Huntington Beach beats them all. I admire Pixar’s classiness in not playing it up.

Serenity is the by far the leading vote-getter in NASA’s contest to name the Node 3 addition to the Space Station, though Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity fans may be concerned about write-in’s from Colbert Nation supporters.

This being NASA, I think they should take in account not only how cool the Serenity spaceship looks (especially on the Blue-Ray disc I just bought at the Circuit City meltdown), but also a highly-underpraised aspect of the Firefly/Serenity universe – it’s quiet in space! Almost all sci-fi shows from Star Trek to to Star Wars to Babylon 5 to Battlestar Galactica (old and new) feature a cacaphony of engine’s revving, lasers (sorry, phasers) blasting and guns blazing. 2001: A Space Odyssey showed it could be done quietly and scientifically correctly, and Joss Whedon did it again, without playing the Blue Danube.

But I feel obligated also to point out a highly-undercriticized aspect of Joss Whedon’s sci-fi vision – where are all the Chinese? I’m accustomed to the lack of Asian representation in Hollywood, but this is supposed to be world spawned from a great Anglo-Chinese alliance in which everyone swears in Chinese and knows how to use chopsticks. There are so few recognizably Asian characters in the series and movie, I was startled to see an Asian face in the bonus features on the Blue-Ray disc (I guess that was a bonus!).

Joss Whedon’s shows are among my favorite (still not sure about Dollhouse…), but they do have “written by a white Hollywood screenwriter” stamped all over them, much like Paul Haggis screenplays and half the shows on the WB. In contrast, take Battlestar Galactica – the fleet is visibly mixed-race and led by a Latino, and it’s no big deal. Even the Cylons have gender and racial variety (just don’t call them toasters!) Hmm, for the next Space Station addition, I hope they name it Galactica.

This weekend, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, I instantly moved ahead in time one hour. After watching Lost this season, I was disappointed the experience wasn’t accompanied by a blinding flash of light. But it did make me think of some time travel stories that have made an impression on me:

• This year, of course, it’s Lost, that somehow keeps a story that looks like it’s going to veer out of control moving along and constantly suspenseful. The biggest mystery – did the writers plan this all along or were they making it up?
• A Sound of Thunder – the original Ray Bradbury story, not the movie. Gives the “butterfly effect” a whole new meaning.
• Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
• Timecop – when will Van Damme receive his lifetime achievement award?
• The Robert Heinlein story in which a man travels back in time and fathers himself
• The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode in which the crew travels back to Roswell
• The Star Trek: Next Generation episode in which Data’s detached head is unearthed
• The Futurama episodes that riff on the previous three
• The Terminator
• The Sarah Connor Chronicles – it’s got enough going on that it deserves to be separated from the movies

The No Asshole Rule is a refreshing break from the CEO-worshipping books on the business shelf that seem to say you need to take the good with the bad (or more evident these days, the bad with the bad). The only item I might quibble with is the origin of the alternative nomenclature, “ass clown”. The author mentions the phrase possibly originating with a professional wrestler or the series The Office, but I’ve only heard it in the movie Office Space – I seem to recall in one of the DVD commentaries an actor saying they came up with that on the spot to maintain their film rating.