a repository of unfinished thoughts
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While attending Digital Hollywood a few weeks ago, I made a point of checking out the Santa Monica Pier. You’ve probably seen it on TV or film numerous times (an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles comes to mind). As usual, I just had my limited Blackberry Pearl camera, but I think this photo came out kind of cool.
A YouTube video from a neighborhood French sandwich shop that I frequent:
In A Long Way to Go, Alice Taylor laments the lack of women listed in Gamasutra’s The Game Developer 50, provides a number of women who could have been included, and suggests splitting the format into 25 men and 25 women. That last idea is an example of going a step too far (although featuring a Top 50 Women list is not a bad idea – then we can debate whether any of them should be in the global Top 50). But it shouldn’t detract from the basic point. Why no women?
To find out why, you really just need to look at the responses, particularly from Gamasutra. We-profile-women-in-other-features is like saying we gave a woman director an Oscar, so everything’s fine in Hollywood. And the defense that those honored were selected specifically for accomplishments last year sounds like a last-minute defense picked out of the air – the inclusion of Jason Della Rocca is essentially a lifetime achievement award (unless they’re rewarding him for stepping down) And then there’s the usual capper – we-work-with-a-lot-of-women-so-we’re-clearly-not-prejudiced. That’s like saying “I’m not prejudiced, some of my best friends are…”
The only way to solve the problem is to admit the problem. Here, I’ll start – when I first read the list on Gamasutra, I didn’t notice that it included no women until I saw Alice’s blog. I’m a guy in a male-dominated industry, I hang out with other guys in the industry, and I’m influenced (programmed, really), by the media (those in the media, you can’t say you’re having a cultural impact and then say you’re not, when it’s convenient). So call me a sexist, I won’t deny it. But I recognize the problem. Put the shoe on the other foot. While I may not be alert as I should be to the ill-representation of women, as an Asian-American, it’s maddening for me to see TV California towns with just one Asian, or a white-populated San Francisco, or Hawaii shows where the leads are all white, or even a sci-fi series set in a future where everyone speaks Chinese but no one is actually Chinese. This happens not because of a lack of talent or we-don’t-have-the-right-role-for-that-type-of-person – it happens because the people in that industry from the top to the bottom will by default select people like themselves, whether it’s scriptwriting, casting, or greenlighting.
I’ll close with one more recent example. Last year I watched the Huntington Beach centennial documentary on HBTV, which was a real snoozer until they unexpectedly waded into serious waters and described the Japanese-American internment of WWII as a “difficult question” of their loyalties “that could not be answered” and only described them as “Japanese residents”, not mentioning that everyone of Japanese descent on the west coast was interned. When I complained to city hall, the response I got was that a “diverse” panel had approved it, and the CD’s had been sent to the local schools! (I can only hope they slept through it). I thought maybe I overreacted, saw it a second time, thought it was even worse than I initially realized, sent another complaint and this time they said they’d ask a Japanese-American member of the Orange County Human Relations Commission to look at it. Six or seven months later, they finally stopped showing the piece and distributing the DVD’s. I would have preferred that they acknowledged the inadequacy of that segment and just included some additional info with the piece directing viewers to resources such as the Japanese American National Museum. But I understand the desire to cover up an embarrassing mistake. Still, I would have appreciated a “Our bad, thanks for pointing it out”, or even better, taking the issue more seriously the first time and doing a little research and introspection.
I noticed a few weeks ago that the City of Huntington Beach made good on their promise (threat) to rename every north-south minor street to “Lane”, so now I live on Sims Lane nee Sims Street. One of my conspiracy theories was that this was a way to get stimulus money, but they just taped over the “St” portion of the signs with “Ln”, so if federal moolah is involved, then they’re not working very hard for it.
I think the real mundane reason for this change is that someone thought it just sounded better. The city officials pushing for the change said it’s required to remove inconsistencies in various street databases that pose a public safety issue (aren’t you actually introducing inconsistencies?) Well, it’s really to conform to an old city specification that north-south streets be named lane (what about all the curved and diagonal and L-shaped streets in my neighborhood?). And every other city has similar specifications (they all have the same convention?). And if we need help from the Long Beach fire department, they’ll be confused if we don’t have this street naming convention (again, they all have the same convention? and isn’t it more confusing that we change street names running from outside into our city?) And these specifications are necessary for the computerized dispatch systems to work (you’re kidding, the computer actually cares if a street is named Lane or Street) And don’t worry about your mail, the post office computer system doesn’t care about street suffixes (well, the fire department should use their computer). The specification is really needed for public safety new hires who aren’t familiar with the city (so you were making up that stuff about the computer?) And you can change your financial information gradually over time (thanks!).
Watching the city council meeting where this was discussed and just about rubber stamped (no discussion of cost or how it would be executed), I thought, these guys really, really want this change. It reminded me of all of my workplaces where management made a fuss over coding style conventions and just said all kinds of stuff to justify it. It’s really important for code safety. It’s important for new hires or others visiting the code. Every company has a convention. It’s not bad, you’ll get used to it. So someone goes through and changes everyone’s code and introduces bugs, and I still end up looking at three-page long functions making improper use of the language and API’s. But it must be good code, because it’s following a coding convention. And it’s got design patterns (coding conventions masquerading as software architecture). And from that point on, I don’t believe anything more from the powers that be, since they made a fuss about this instead of focusing on important matters (there’s a coding style guidebook behind every worthless startup stock certificate on my wall). Same with my civic leaders – next time I watch a city council meeting, I’ll be sure to disbelieve everything they say.
I was content to use one of the presupplied themes for my twitter account, unti I saw a twitter profile page with a photo as the background. I thought, that’s lame, I can do a better job. After trying out various layouts that didn’t squash or stretch properly or blend nicely with the content area, I climbed back into my graphic design comfort zone and just used one of my beach photos.
I hate corporate meetings largely because 1) people say stupid things, and 2) you’re stuck in a room listening to it. Which is why I stayed home and watched the Huntington Beach city council meeting on HBTV while my neighbor valiantly attended to oppose the resolution for city-wide address changes.
In our case, the change is relatively minor, changing our street suffix from Street to Lane, so minor that it begs the question why it’s being done at all. The postcard announcing the change stated that there were discrepancies among databases and thus it’s a public safety issue that needs to be rectified, since the city uses an automated address system. When I inquired which databases were inconsistent, as I found none among any of the utilities, vendors or tax agencies I deal with, not to mention the authoritative Thomas Guide, I received clarification that the change for my street was to accomodate a city specification that north-south minor streets be labelled “Lane”, and then an additional plug on the public safety issue. When I pointed out one more time that since everyone else was consistent, even if there was one mystery database used by the city that wasn’t, changing the street name now would certainly generate more inconsistency, not less, the responder finally shut up about the public safety spin and said she’d forward my comments to the planning commission. I appreciate the responses, but I would have felt better if I hadn’t discovered everyone else who inquired received the same responses, word for word. Cut-and-paste is a god-send for bureaucrats.
In any case, it’s possible our complaints had some effect – the powerpoint presentation at the council meeting showed the resolution split into two parts, or perhaps two resolutions (I thought it was two resolutions, but it seemed there was one vote), the first part to resolve discrepancies among databases and the second to make addresses conform to the city specifications. But then the fire chief, police chief and former police chief touted the public safety issue again, saying they knew their way around but they rely on agencies in neighboring areas to help out and they might get lost. So, a fire truck from Long Beach is going to cruise right by my condo because they see an “St.” on the end of the street sign? To confuse issues further, councilman Hardy assured my neighbor that for a simple suffix change, the post office won’t care, because they use an automated addressing system. And then she went on to explain that we had to make the change because the public safety addressing system required it. This is one of those situations where I’m thinking I’m talking to an idiot, or they’re assuming I’m stupid enough to believe what they’re saying, or we really do have the worst IT system ever. Hey, this really is like a corporate meeting.
With the holiday season nearly upon us, I’m busy throwing away the increasing stacks of donation-mail (thank you ACLU, for selling my address!). But I’m in the mood to do some revenue-sharing for a good cause, so I’m going to try something: through the remainder of this year, 30% of the proceeds for all HyperBowl lanes on the App Store will go to Get Well Gamers, a charity based here in Huntington Beach that supplies video games to assist in pain mangament for hospitalized children.
That’s 30% of what I get from Apple, so for a $.99 app, I get about $.70, and 30% of that is approximately $.21.
There are two HyperBowl lanes right now, HyperBowl Classic and HyperBowl Rome, but I might get in one or two more lanes, depending on my own progress, the arrival of the next Unity iPhone release, and, as always, Apple approval (in fact, the next Unity iPhone release will address new rejection criteria that resultd from the Storm8 brouhaha)
I received a postcard from the city of Huntington Beach saying Sims Street would henceforth be known as Sims Lane, citing database inconsistencies and issues of public safety. When I asked which databases were inconsistent, considering Google, Thomas Bros., and all my bills say Sims Street, they answered with a clarification that Sims St. is inconsistent with a city specification that minor north-south streets would be named “Lane”. And then there was some more mumbo-jumbo about mismatched databases and public safety. Perhaps there’s a real problem to be solved here, but it sounds like someone looked at a map, say the block I live on didn’t match the surrounding area with their north-south lanes (and that’s a convention?) and decided it just had to be fixed.
This reminds me of one of the more disastrous programming cleanups that I didn’t actually instigate, but did accede to. Someone decided one of our functions should have different parameters and consequently changed the function (this is called “refactoring” nowadays to make it sound like a cool process). This was seamless in that all of the existing uses of the function still compiled, but non-seamless in that they all crashed when run, and it took months to root out each one of them and make the required changes. There is a proper way to do this in software – create a new function (just don’t do something lame like just append “Ex” like Microsoft did in Win32), and deprecate the old one with some kind of compiler warning (new languages support this). Or you can just leave it alone.
In the case of renaming streets, I don’t see any seamless transition. Contrary to the purported motivation, renaming the streets is going to result in at least temporary inconsistency in databases (and is Thomas Bros. going to recall all their existing maps from stores?), and I’m certain the post office will be receiving mail addressed to both Street and Lane for the next few decades. And that still leaves the question – what about all those streets that run at an angle from North-South? I see some are named “Lane” and some are named “Drive”.
Since I only have six working TV channels, one of which is the Huntington Beach city channel (HBTV), I’ve been catching snippets of 100 Years of Huntington Beach, basically a pleasant trip down memory lane including reminiscences of the city’s first beach concession, the introduction of surfing, yada yada. But I was appalled by the segment mentioning the internment of local Japanese-Americans (including citizens and whole families) during World War II. It came off as, the General had a tough decision to make, and he made it. Followed by a resident remembering a nice boy she wanted to date before he got sent off to the camp. Oh, well. Sucks to be them.
So I sent a semi-snippy suggestion to the city that they edit the film to remove that segment, if they couldn’t do the topic justice, and received this prompt, polite and not altogether satisfactory reply:
Thank you for your thoughtful comments regarding the history video. I know we tried to include it as part of the history of Huntington Beach. I will share your concerns with others in leadership in the community. The program is featured on our government channel, website and was shown on KOCE. We have also distributed hundreds of copies to individuals, middle schools and high schools. Yours is the first “negative” comment we have received and I can assure you people of all different backgrounds have viewed the video. Thanks again for your input.
No-one-else-complained-about-it is the type of reply I used to get from apartment landlords, and it’s pretty weak as an academic argument. We-already-distributed-it-to-a-bunch-of-students is just upsetting. I don’t remember getting any of this subject when I was in school – I hope there isn’t a whole generation of kids who are learning that sending American citizens to live behind barbed wire because of their race was a “difficult choice”. And aside from portraying it as a debatable decision (I thought we were beyond that, like the debatability of separate-but-equal and anti-miscegenation laws), the segment was light on facts, not mentioning that the governer and President supported it, that it only took place in California and not even Hawaii where Pearl Harbor happened, and that many had their land usurped by unscrupulous neighbors.
Finally, I can’t believe all the “different backgrounds” included anyone who’s family was affected by this, or, say, Arab/Muslim/Persian Americans who might consider this type of thing could happen to them. (If there’s ever a war with China, I guess I better get packing). The HB centennial program includes a couple of talks on the internment, one from the last baby born inside the camp, so surely some people in the city government know better.
Whoever’s in charge of that film could take a cue from Ken Burns, who adjusted his documentary The War after complaints that he failed to depict Latino-Americans. He said afterward that the film was just as good after the change (although in some odd logic he said that validated his original methods – c’mon, you’re a media guy, just admit you’re a product of culture just like everyone else. I grew up with 70′s television, and the only minorities I remember from then is Speedy Gonzales, Pat Morita speaking fake Chinese in Happy Days, various African-Americans on the wrong side of the law in cop movies, and Bill Cosby. And in this supposedly post-racial time, the situation isn’t a lot better – TV land is by default white).
The War also has extensive treatment of the internment and the Japanese-Americans who volunteered anyway to fight in Europe and suffered terrible losses there. If Ken Burns isn’t your cup of tea, you can listen to George Takei talk about it on this web site, or just google “Japanese internment” – there’s plenty of information.