Recently Severin, a storyline I have been working on, has been the target of an interesting script writing analysis over at Kung Fu Cabbage. The point here is to learn how to convert a full story into a script form. This is something I’ve been struggling with for quite some time. My idea always was to one day have the entire Severin story in script form and use it to convert the story into a comic book format. Since I know squat about script writing, this analysis could be quite useful. For now the first article over there only deals with some basic first steps. I am eagerly awaiting the second part. Apparently parts of the Severin story will be used as examples.
Sep
18
Weren’t the 80’s a fun age? Every day a new toy was invented. Computer programming languages became widely popular and the first companies started to spring from the ground to invent new things. Home computers and operating systems became accessible to the average user and everything seemed joyfully simple and straight forward. However, computers were still far away from being an every-day commodity. Though QBasic was easy enough to learn still in later years, it took a special kind of people to make good use of this technology. Most of the world remained complacent with the old trusty IBM Personal Selectric type writers.
Entertainment didn’t have a viable portable medium at this point until Sony came along and brought us the Walkman. Within the first ten years since publication in 1979, Sony sold 50 million Walkman units just like the one you see in the image above. While the quality and mechanics inside the unit advanced over time, the principle stayed the same
Push the button, listen to the music.
The first versions of the Walkman featured merely the basic play, fast forward and rewind buttons and a breathtakingly awesome feature called “hotline” which allowed communication over the music track through a microphone. Communication with whom? Here comes the most amazing feature - the second listener. Thats right. The first Walkman featured dual jacks so that two people could listen at the same time. Not much later the feature was phased out with the Walkman II and instead. In 1989 the WM-DD9 was launched and it now included a Mega Bass/DBB bass boost and an auto reverse mode.
So much for the wonders of 80’s technology. Push a button and it works. Tapes were analogue and batteries were the only things required to make it work. Now, I must wonder how the Help Desk hotlines functioned back then. Did they have any help desk hotlines? I was too young in 1985 to have called one for support. As a matter of fact, at that age I was more interested in taking the Walkman appart than to actually use it for its intended purpose. Mind you, taking apart was the only thing I was interested in. I wasn’t one of the wizkids who actually had the intention of putting it back together.
Fast forward to 2007. Technology has advanced beyond the hopes and dreams of the 80’s Tech-Revolution. Telephones are cellular, music is digital, CRT monitors are replaced with LCD and Plasma screens, computer games are no longer monochrome or CGA based, computer harddrives are now 1TB instead of 20MB and the movie War Games, despite the Stanislaw-Petrow incident, never became a reality.
Children can already program routines, children can learn Photoshop, children write scripts for computer games, children rip DVDs, children send Worms around the internet, causing multimillion dollar losses to corporations world-wide. Computer magazines and TV shows educate you relentlessly about new technologies and a world without SMS services and Twitter would be unthinkable for many. Even the elderly have begun to make their own home pages, make YouTube vlogs and participate in online dating services. The world has gone digital and people of the likes of William Gibson must be quite impressed with their own foresight when they wrote books like Neuromancer. Or perhaps they just steered technology into that direction with their visionary writings. Whichever it was, it is now undeniable that we’re being drowned in technological advances on a daily basis and as such the gadgets which we’re adopting into our every day lives get more complex as they progress.
My first Nokia cellphone was able to keep an address book, make calls and send an SMS. That was simple. Now cellphones can surf the web and you can participate in ebay auctions if you want to. Does this require a more complex technology which isn’t as easy to use as it was only a few years ago? Yes. Obviously. We can all agree that we’ve had a lot of new things to learn in the last century. Things changed fast and they required us to adapt. Most of us have done this. Most of us adapted to our brave new world. My father did and so did my mother. They both use Skype, stream video from their computers over a media center to their plasma TV, use and configure routers for their home networks and know that it takes more than the push of a button to make the internets send data through the tubes. They are both over 50. Cool.
Would you now believe me that there are actually people much younger than them who have not yet grasped the spirit of the year 2000? I call them the Sony Walkman Generation. These are the type of people who will storm back into a store with their router/media center/modem/dvd player, screaming and yelling that it is too complicated, that the user would have to be an IT professional to use it and that the “easy setup” that was promised on the packaging was false advertisement. They will complain, bully and sue any given employee, store or manufacturer just to divert attention away from their own ineptitude. They call hotlines and yell at hapless tech support agents, blaming their troubles on the complex nature of the VPN Dual WAN Port Firewall Router and Dual Band Access Point they bought for 700 dollars just a week ago. They fail to reflect on their own failure to educate themselves.
Oh no! There’s no play button! They have to actually read the manual! Gosh!
What has the world come to when you can no longer make your expensive high tech toys work with the push of a single button? What has the world come to where you actually have to understand the technology to use it properly? Is the industry forcing it down their throats? Certainly not. Do consumers fall into a marketing trap? Certainly yes. But it’s not the trap of the manufacturer. Often blamed for user unfriendly design of their products, the manufacturer isn’t actually the culprit here.
Fingers should be pointed in two directions.
Following are the two culprits:
The Reseller - He is the one who should inform the customer of what he is buying and in the best case he should also advise the customer on the correct product.
The customer - He shouldn’t be so awefully stupid. I think that pretty much explains it well enough. Customers shouldn’t buy the most expensive, coolest sounding device just because it may work wonders. They should buy what they need. As stated above, resellers should be providing the service of matching the need with the product.
I feel I have to make this a personal address:
Dear Sirs, Madams and valued customers,
If you want to go online you will buy a MoDem.
If you want to go online with two computers simultaneously you get a switch for the MoDem.
If you want to be protected from the incredulous dangers of the internet, you install a firewall or just update your OS with the latest security patches.
If you want to connect wirelessly, you get an access point for your MoDem.
But if all that you want is to go online and you buy a router and then yell at tech support that the damn thing can’t go online and only two days ago you threw away your old modem because routers are cooler … well then you’re an IDIOT and they should take away your computer license. It’s just a shame there isn’t such a thing.
You’re the Sony Walkman Generation.
There is something wrong with you.
Read The Fucking Manual and get with the times, man!
Technology is progressing and so should you. Progress is a developmental state in which things grow or develop in complexity, scope, or severity. It will never get easier. You will always have to learn and move along with the times. Nobody is going to wait for you.
Sincerely,
Mr. Cytizen
Sep
11
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I’d like to present to you a Pennyarcade masterpiece.
This just has to be the most comprehensive depiction of your average anonymous, normal person turned apeshit crazy on just about any social network - ranging from games to websites.
Sep
11
I had just finished re-opening my blog on my main domain when I thought “Cytizen, think. What can you do to make your blog more accessible to a wider range of people?” The question was paramount. Consider all the types of readers you could possibly have. What is the first thing you have to consider to even provide the correct environment for comfortable accessibility? The answer is simple.
People have to be able to read your blog.
Before you should even consider catchy content, SEO optimization, proper tagging, social network propagation, fancy graphics, google adsense and A-Lister type content, you have to provide an environment that allows people to read your blog comfortably. How to do this? It’s not all that difficult.
Shouldn’t that be enough? It should. For most people. What if some of your readers still have trouble reading the content? Tired eyes, the font still too small, too much contrast, not enough contrast? Is there a workaround for this? Yes.
Let readers become listeners.
The guys over at Odeogo have dealt with the problem and created an ingenous service that, after a free subscription, reads out your text content and turns it into audio files, located on their servers. With a simple plugin and hardly any configuration, a little “listen” button is appended to your posts and viewers can then listen your posts in surprisingly high quality sound. The TTS (text to speech) engine used here, does a really good job at sounding human and isn’t in the least annoying. Try it out on PlanetOzh’s blog. Just click on the “Listen Now” link under the post.
Liked it? So did I. Why did I send you to his blog then? Why aren’t you able to just click on this button in this very post, here?
I’ll give you the answer. I tried this plugin and it worked like a charm. But the charm didn’t last for long when I realized what had happened to my blog in the meantime. Each time the main page or any individual post was loaded, it added around 2 seconds wait time for the Odeogo plugin icon to load on each post. Unacceptable in my book. We forgot one important point in above’s listing for accessibility.
The well versed blogger will now say “Dude. Just fiddle around with it. Don’t you know xhtml, php, javascript and Klingon? Optimize it!” Sure. I’d do that. But I don’t speak Klingon. And Joe “I blog because I want to write not because I want to code” Average can’t optimize it. Sure, Ozh over at the page I sent you to for the demo, he did something to it. It loads lightning fast. However, I don’t know how to do this. Should I have to know? Perhaps. I write about geekish things, right? I should have an obligation to fiddle with it until it loads without noticable delays. But guess what? I’m a user. I try to be a writer. I don’t want to be a coder. I want my toys to work out of the box. I’m a user writing about geekery.
User. For those that over saw the word.
us·er1 /?yuz?r/
–noun
1. a person or thing that uses.
2. one who uses drugs, esp. as an abuser or addict.
3. Computers. a person who uses a computer.
Note the distinct lack of anything refering to the detailed skills or actions of a programmer. How many other users are out there? Dumb question.
I don’t want my blog to load 2 seconds longer per posting on the front page just to make my content heard instead of read.
Is this the plugin’s fault? I have no idea. Perhaps it’s just Wordpress flawed structure. Perhaps its my server. Perhaps its the plugin, afterall. In the end, only one thing counts. My page takes ages to load with the plugin and loads instantly without it. What a shame. I’ll kindly accept anyone’s advice on how to make it work better, though. I like the plugin.
Sep
9
Woopdeedoo. I’m back. If that wasn’t a long break, then I don’t know what it was. Probably the usual disheartening period of not knowing what to write about. Perhaps also a big block of blank regarding ideas for Severin. Oh, yes. Severin is still an idea and I never intended to stop writing on it. I just couldn’t bring myself to be creative.
Instead I spent my time on World of Warcraft and then some more time on practicing my guitar quite recently.
Nevermind all the excuses, though. Let’s get back to work; see what I can come up with.
