firehose

By Craig Pearson on December 20th, 2013 at 3:00 pm.

My trip to Frontier was a costly one. All through the day, David Braben kept teasing me about a special surprise he had for me, one that I was forbidden to mention (until today). Was it the Thargoids? Was he a Thargoid? I took note that his office was curiously round, like the cockpit of a ship, and I warily entered it. It wasn’t that: as I sat down, he asked me if I wanted to play Elite: Dangerous on the Oculus Rift? Did I? I did. I’m allowed to tell you this because the Elite alpha has just updated support for Track IR, 3D TVs, and the Oculus Rift, and my time with it has convinced me I need a Rift in my life.

He gave me the device–and in my head he whispered “you will believe” while he was swathed in a heavenly shaft of light, but really he just said “put this on”–and handed me an Xbox controller. I’ve tried the Rift one time before, and it wasn’t very smooth. It made me feel slightly nauseous, which was my final thought as I slipped the headset over my face. Though it arrived like this: “Don’t you dare puke on David Braben’s nice jumper.”

I was in. A gentle turn of my head didn’t elicit any comets of vomit, which was a good sign because the first time the effect was immediately apparent. I think the lagginess of the previous game was to blame, as it didn’t keep up with my head movements. I was in a cockpit and beyond that frame I could see asteroids and the little spaceship I was to hunt down and destroy. They were a little low-res and pixelated (the Rift’s dev kit is 640×800 per eye), but nonetheless my brain clicked and said: “You’re in a space ship. You’re in Elite.”

My brain and I do a lot of talking, and it always sounds like a portentous TV character. But it was right: I was inside the new Elite! I did the thing everybody does when they put on the headset and span my head around like I was a human bobblehead. Just a few hours prior, if I turned like this, I’d have caught the attention of three Elite: Dangerous developers and their PR lady. Now I saw stars, asteroids, and even the back of my seat and the door of the cockpit. I looked down, but I was bodiless, though that’s something Frontier plan on changing.

Apparently this build lagged a few weeks behind the one I’d been playing. It was also missing a crosshair, which I asked about. One will arrive, but Braben explained it’s a tough element to get right: “They were disabled as they didn’t have a position on 3D. We’re experimenting with them at different 3D distances in the world – it feels wrong to have the gun-sight feel like it is inside the cockpit but should be further out into the world – a bit like they do with HUDs in real planes or even in some recent cars like BMWs. We will tune it until it feels ‘right’ but this is the beauty of an Alpha – we can adjust it over time.”

All the impressive, immersive tricks the HUD needed to pull to help you to track a target aren’t needed when you can just move my head. It changed everything. I tracked the ship for a little bit, watching it slink through the asteroids. I could still see the jets burn as he twisted away in front of me, though in the confines of the Rift he now felt further away. I boosted to keep him close, but instead of locking on to keep track, I just watched, tilting my head as he swam to the left of my view and then following with the ship’s controls. If you think about that for a second, you’ll realise it reverses a lot of what’s true in dog-fighting situations without head-tracking: I’d have had to keep up with it before to keep it in view, constantly adjusting to keep it in sight. Now I knew exactly where I was turning to, which enabled me to adjust my speed a lot more accurately. The ship was never out of my view, though the missing crosshair did cause me some trouble with aiming. I won’t be ending this piece with a triumphant final blast of my weapons.

But something better happened: I boosted a little bit more, trying to get the ship directly in front of me to help with my aim. It was fighting me all the way, swimming and spinning off centre, locking the pair of us into a spiral. I decided the best way to solve this was to get closer and just ram it. I steadied and then pushed the throttle all the way up, this time just minutely adjusting my trajectory to avoid oversteering. As I got closer, I fired again and the ship took evasive action; it pulled sharply up and I passed underneath him. I could see the detail of the ship as it drifted overhead: the thrusters burned on one side as it tried to push out and away, there was a little smear of damage from where I’d clipped it.

I followed the ship as it passed over my head, the transparent cockpit roof enabling me to track it without any trouble. It carried on, nearly dipping behind the back of my ship before I snapped out of it: he was trying to get behind me. I swapped power from the weapons to the engines to make my turn tighter, reversed thrusters, and let his momentum carry him back over me. I didn’t lose sight of him at any point. It was a moment that took me out of the game, a purely instinctive response to the situation. I never thought about the steps I needed to take, I just did it. I felt like an amazing pilot.

It turns out Braben had a similar experience. He said: “To me, it felt quite different too. It felt very open. I loved the feeling of watching an opponent’s ship soar above my cockpit and as it came close seeing the damage I had done to it. It had the feeling of being in a cockpit of a small plane, where I could see all around me, rather than just looking out of a front window.”

The rest of the time was spent trying to shoot it, but the missing crosshairs left me firing bullets into the abyss. They’re probably still travelling, alone and lost. I’d quite like to join them. There are games you know how you’re going to play before you ever get the chance to play them. When I pledged to the Kickstarter, it was with the aim of eventually playing as an Explorer class. I’d be alone and on the edge of space, the canopy of my ship creeping with ice. I always imagined that, in that position, I’d be aware of my surroundings, because all my memories of Frontier seem to be wrapped in a cockpit, and not sat in front of a portable television with a CD32 controllers in my hands. This experience was dangerously close to fulfilling that vision.

Wasting no time after the public release of OS X 10.9.1 earlier this week, Apple has released a beta of OS X 10.9.2 to developers. According to 9to5Mac, developers were asked to focus on Mail, Messages, VPN, graphics drivers, and VoiceOver. However the most intriguing feature is FaceTime Audio, which has been "deeply integrated" into Messages and FaceTime OS X apps.

Apple first introduced voice-only FaceTime calls on its mobile devices in iOS 7, but this will be the first time desktops see the feature. This upgrade was going to come sooner or later, because it will essentially complete Apple's full set of text, voice, and video communication tools across platforms.

FaceTime Audio would round out Apple's communication tools

Even with this upgrade expanding FaceTime's scope, its main competitor Skype probably doesn't have to move over just yet. Since tools like FaceTime only work on Apple products, Skype still has the edge thanks to its functionality across a wide range of devices. As with any beta release, FaceTime Audio could change or be removed prior to 10.9.2's release, but it's a logical next step.

Futurama is over. No, really this time. After seven seasons, a few cancellations, and multiple visits to parallel universes, the long-running sci-fi animated series finally ended its run on September 4th, with the final episode "Meanwhile." Executive producer and head writer David X. Cohen has been along for the whole bumpy adventure, taking charge of the show following stints writing for Beavis and Butthead and The Simpsons. With the complete series now bundled in a big, expansive box set, we took the chance to talk to Cohen about mixing science fiction and comedy, the pitfalls of being canceled, and Futurama's legacy.

What's it like seeing all of these years of work in a single box?

That's a really good summary of it. For one thing, it felt like a lot of years working in a box. The writing staff, including me, spent a lot of our time in a small room, packed together, working day in, day out on these episodes. It's very appropriate that these 12 years of our life in a box are now released in an only slightly smaller box than what we've been living in. It's a good encapsulation of my life for the past decade. It staggers me even to just think we did this much work in that period of time.

How did the ending of the last season compare to the other times the show ended?

It feels a little more final to me. I think we really hit the right tone, at least for what I was looking for on this most recent last episode ever, "Meanwhile." It's a somewhat crazy time-travel story that involves a lot of very short trips 10 seconds back in time over and over again. But at the same time, it's a very touching story about Fry and Leela. This time we felt a little more confident that it might be the really, really last episode ever, so we decided to push the story ahead with Fry and Leela and show their actual wedding. For anyone who doesn't know that, I'm not really spoiling anything because the wedding is just the beginning of their troubles, and there is much more Futurama beyond the wedding in the episode.

It strikes a very nice tone, a balance between crazy sci-fi and actual emotion. If it really is the last episode ever, and I think it will be, then I feel pretty proud of how it ended.

Looking back, how do you think those production issues influenced the final product? Did it turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing?

Production issues is a real nice euphemism for many cancellations. It's interesting, I don't know if it's a good thing or bad thing, but ultimately I will say that the later episodes in my mind are actually a lot better than the earlier episodes. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, but I think the average quality of both the writing and the animation was better in the later episodes. That's just because you learn what works and what doesn't over the course of any series.

"Production issues is a real nice euphemism for many cancellations."

With Futurama one thing we learned was to take the science fiction more seriously as we went along. Originally our thinking was that it will be hard to make this funny if we take the science fiction seriously, but it turned out that was not the case at all, and in fact when we took the sci-fi really seriously the jokes were sort of a relief from that and played even better. Ultimately we found that many of our best sci-fi episodes were also the funniest episodes. That was a big lesson and made a lot of the later episodes better.

But another thing that was more directly related to being off for a few years was the technology advanced quite a bit. Between incarnations of the show it went from being standard definition, old-style television to wide screen, high def, surround sound, all of that kind of stuff. For that reason also the later episodes just are stunning to look at. In that sense I guess it did help us a little bit. If we had done all of these things earlier they wouldn't have looked nearly as nice.

Was it a big challenge to balance the often super-nerdy subject matter with making a show that's funny and accessible?

You just have to constantly remind yourself that the show is not about the setting. In other words, the show takes place in a crazy universe in the future and there are monsters and aliens and robots and stuff, but the story is about the conflicts between the characters and their emotions. You can have any kind of crazy thing happen and it looks interesting and gets your attention, but really to have people care about it you have to believe that Bender is a person inside, even if he's a robot. Or that Dr. Zoidberg has human concerns even if he's a talking lobster.

It's just a process of constantly reminding yourself not to forget that. If they're in a crazy situation they need to respond like real people, even if they're not people.

"You just have to constantly remind yourself that the show is not about the setting."

With some of the episodes in the last season, a lot of them are about modern technology like 3D printing as opposed to futuristic stuff. Was that a conscious decision?

We always like it when the real world gives us ideas for episodes. Setting the show 1,000 years in the future does not mean you're not going to comment on society today, it just makes it one step removed. Some good episodes have come out of it. The 3D-printing episode you mentioned was inspired directly by the fact that we got a 3D printer in our office that we were playing with. It was running basically 24 hours a day for several years, printing up little Benders and spaceships in our writers' room. A), that gave us the inspiration for an episode about 3D printers and B), possibly the plastic fumes may have inspired some of the writing.

One of the best episodes we did after we returned to Comedy Central was "Attack of the Killer App." It was about this device, the eyePhone, that had been invented in the year 3,000 and was actually a phone that was implanted in your eyeball and projected a little screen in front of your eye. iPhones didn't exist when we had our final season on Fox in 2003, and then it came into being and we had material about people being on their smartphones all the time. Real life certainly did give us material, even during the years we were canceled.

Do you have a particular favorite episode?

I go back and forth between two. In the original run of the show there was an episode called "The Luck of the Fryrish." It was our first tearjerker episode, where Fry learned a lot about his brother who had been left behind. And we didn't know if it was going to work or not, it was very difficult to write and we didn't know if the fans would buy into the emotions of a cartoon character. But ultimately they did and it opened up a whole new avenue of emotional episodes for us.

Of the more recent run, I guess I'd have to go with the episode "The Late Philip J. Fry," which was a huge time travel extravaganza, where Fry, Bender, and the professor get into this one-way time machine that can only go forwards in time, and they find themselves going further and further into the future with no hope of returning. That one was fun because we got to see a million versions of the future as their dilemma gets worse and worse.

Now that you can look back at the show and where it fits in, what do you think will be Futurama's legacy?

That's a good question and something that I think about a little bit. I think one clear thing I can point to is that there are very few entries in the general category of comedy science fiction. And there are some that are not very good. There's some writing that's good, but there's not a lot of TV or movies that are comedy sci-fi. If it's anything, the legacy might be that it's a viable genre of entertainment. In our best episodes we managed to do those two things at the same time, so I feel like we blazed a little bit of a trail.

The line at the post office was 18 people deep.

I’d been waiting awhile, and was thinking about something I’d read: that in Europe, public services are for the public — meaning everyone — whereas in the US, public services are for those who can’t afford a private alternative. Hence the wait.

I looked around and noticed that no one among the patrons or the employees was a white man. At the Hanover Street post office, a half block off Wall Street, that was notable.

A white man walked in. He surveyed the line and confidently jetted past it, over to an employee pushing a wheeled bin across the floor. He put his hand on the employee’s back. He said, “Hey buddy … can you do me a favor? I just have this one thing.”

I also just have this one thing, I thought. And, this line is for people who have one or more things, douchebag. And, you have no right to ask a “favor” that dicks over 18 people uninvolved in granting the “favor.”

Fortunately, the mystified employee — who was not white — sent him to the back of the line. I gloated. I tweeted. I’ve met that guy before. We all have. Unless you ARE that guy, and you’re like a fish who doesn’t realize the water is wet.

James Altucher recently posted a short piece on Quora entitled, How to Break All the Rules and Get Everything You Want.

In this piece, Altucher — whose Wikipedia page contains the phrase “ran a fund of hedge funds” — recounts the tale of taking his daughter out for a fashion show and some ping-pong. When he is not on the list at the fashion show (a friend had promised to add him), he manipulates his way in. When the ping-pong venue is closed due to a private event, he manipulates his way in and plays ping-pong at someone else’s party.

He believes his fun evening provides a lesson for us all: “Don’t break the laws. Don’t kill people. Don’t steal. But most other rules can be bent.”

James Altucher thinks he has written an article about “getting everything you want.” He has actually written an article about white privilege. (And probably class privilege, and male privilege, and maybe some others.)

You know that fun game you play at Chinese restaurants, where you add “in bed” to everybody’s fortune? You will achieve great success this year … in bed.

I have a related suggestion for Altucher’s article. Just add “if you’re white” or “because I’m white” to each generalization or anecdote in the article. For instance:

“I find when you act confused but polite then people want to help if you’re white. There was a line behind me. I wasn’t fighting or angry. So there was no reason for anyone to get angry at me, because I’m white.”

“I wasn’t fighting or angry. So there was no reason for anyone to get angry at me.”

Really, now? You peacefully barged your way into a fashion show in the same town in which Forest Whitaker peacefully attempted to buy yogurt with actual money. Guess who fared better?

There are many people in this country for whom it is exceedingly dangerous to assume that if you aren’t angry, there’s no reason for anyone to be angry at you.

Here is one of them:

See: The Case of Renisha McBride — Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic

Here is another:

See: Jonathan Ferrell, Former Football Player, Killed by Police After Seeking Help Following Car Wreck — Dave Zirin in The Nation

But please, let’s continue.

“Then when the lights started to dim, the ushers waved to Mollie. There was an extra seat near the front!”

Let us also note: While Altucher is trying to provide a delightful evening for his daughter, the entire setup of this evening is that his friend Nathan has gotten him “on the list” for a fashion show, although it turns out that he is not actually on the list.

Altucher’s response: “WHAT!?” He drops the Wall Street Journal’s name. He does work there, but he doesn’t cover fashion. He’s not going to cover the show.

So this story has already begun with Altucher trying to nab “great seats” that, if they “belonged” to anyone, rightly belonged to fashion journalists who would write about the show, or celebrities who would bring cachet to the fashion line.

The posture of taking begins before the story even starts.

Let’s move on to the ping-pong part of the story. Altucher and his daughter are told that they cannot rent a table because Bank of America has rented out the entire place.

“I said, ‘can we just walk around and watch all the players?’ And they let us, because we’re white. I saw a table labeled “Bank of America” that was empty and it had two racquets left on it. So Mollie and I played ping pong for the next hour. Nobody noticed, because we’re white.”

Maybe nobody noticed because you happened to look a lot like the other Bank of America employees?

Or maybe people did notice, and were annoyed, and that’s why someone eventually asked you to leave.

I have often had encounters with men who take something that’s not theirs, and when they encounter no outright resistance — there’s no loud talking, no playground-style tussle — they assume everything is fine.

It is not fine.

Sometimes, you take the best desk for yourself in the new office. Sometimes, you take credit for someone else’s work or ideas. Sometimes, you’re on a team, and someone from the client company assumes that you — the tallest, whitest member — are in charge, and you do not correct them. Sometimes, it’s just that someone baked cookies to congratulate their team on a job well-done, and you’re not on that team but you wanted a cookie, and no one seemed to mind.

Yes, I’ll speak up if you take my coworker’s idea. I’m relatively privileged myself; I can afford the emotional energy. I’m very good at, “I think that’s basically what Lindsay proposed in last week’s meeting. I’m glad to see you’ve come to support her idea!” I won’t speak up about a stupid cookie. But if it’s part of a larger pattern, I’ll notice. That shit adds up.

Oftentimes, when you take (or ask for!) things that do not belong to you, women are giving you the side-eye and exchanging glances with each other. Maybe you don’t care, because you are “getting everything you want.” But I call these glances “networking,” and I consider your obliviousness to them a lack of social skills and a deficit of emotional intelligence.

Maybe right now you can respond, “Who cares?” But raise your sons with the same entitled attitude, and in twenty years, in an awful lot of industries, they’ll be the ones shut out. That world is dying.

“It seems small, but we broke all the rules and had a fun time, because we’re white. The key is that we were simply nice to everyone and didn’t argue and were very thankful at everything we got to do and we’re white.”

We’re coming to the moral of the story:

“Don’t break the laws. Don’t kill people. Don’t steal. But most other rules can be bent if you’re white.”

I’ll bet you can buy Skittles in any neighborhood you want.

And here’s the ending:

“If you act like the river, you ultimately flow past all the rocks along the way if you’re white.”

ARE YOU SERIOUSLY CLOSING THIS WITH A FAUX BUDDHIST APHORISM?

It happens all the time that white people claim not to be racist because they didn’t intend to be racist; they weren’t thinking about that at all.

But there are many situations in which it is precisely your job to think about that. Nothing induces more rage in others than your taking what you do not deserve and not even noticing.

A small example: Sometimes I am waiting in line, killing time on my phone, when the cashier, ticket-taker, or receptionist summons me forward. (I am fairly certain that I read as a Fancy White Lady. Now that I have a wedding ring, I may have reached the very peak of privilege in my lifetime.)

In situations in which it’s not clear which way the line is supposed to form, or in which multiple lines ultimately lead to the same service point, it has absolutely happened that I was being invited to jump ahead of someone.

Plenty of positive thinking literature would encourage me to see this as manifesting abundance or drawing positive energy my way. Megapastor Joel Osteen — in godly-abundance manual It’s Your Time — suggests that God gives him the best parking spaces and wants him to have a spacious home. Plenty of positive thinkers on Pinterest repin pretty pastel graphics offering up NO NEGATIVE THOUGHTS ALLOWED and A NEGATIVE MIND WILL NEVER GIVE YOU A POSITIVE LIFE.

Altucher might suggest that I am “getting everything I want” by simply being nice to everyone, not arguing, and being thankful.

There is a difference between “being nice to everyone” and “being nice to everyone you happen to notice.”

Skipping ahead of people in line, even when invited to do so, is better referred to as “being an asshole.” And obliviousness to your own privilege is no excuse. If you’re absorbed in your phone and not really sure if you’re rightfully next in line, it’s your job to look around and say, “I’m sorry, were you here before me?”

When you are an affluent-seeming white man and you ask for things that don’t belong to you, sometimes you’re not really asking. It’s sort like Bill Clinton asking Monica Lewinsky to have sex with him. There’s a context behind the asking.

When you ask a serviceperson for something that doesn’t belong to you, there is often a subtext of, “If I complain to your manager, you know your manager is going to listen to me. Just look at me, and look at you.”

And sometimes, of course, this is not the case at all, and you’re just being a garden-variety annoying customer. Or a bully.

If you seem to be “getting everything you want,” you should probably examine whether you’re getting it at someone’s expense, or whether you’re just constantly, in small ways, making the world worse.

After finding Altucher’s post outrageously tone-deaf and deciding to write about it here, I wondered if I was being a little harsh. Obviously, I’ve used Altucher’s short piece to talk about broader patterns.

I’m not too familiar with Altucher’s work, so I sidled on over to his website and clicked on the first few posts whose titles interested me. A post about being “humiliated by yoga” contained the following comment about a woman in India who vomited for fifteen straight minutes: “The deepest recesses of her throat were the most beautiful instruments I had ever heard.”

Hilarious, right? I’m sure she’s fine. She must have a good health care plan. The same post contains this comment, about the bodies of men in yoga class:

They have muscles in places called tibias, femurs, psoas. Parts of the body I never heard of. Like when you suddenly look at a map of the world and realize for the first time that Africa is broken up into many tiny countries that you never knew existed and most likely will never visit.

I sincerely hope Altucher was in elementary school when he realized “for the first time that Africa is broken up into many tiny countries.”

A post about “How to Be the Luckiest Guy on the Planet” offers:

“I don’t get close to anyone bringing me down. This rule can’t be broken. Energy leaks out of you if someone is draining you. And I never owe anyone an explanation. Explaining is draining.”

From a piece about public speaking: “When possible, I will directly steal a joke from whatever comedian I’m watching.”

A post called “Do You Control Your Life?” ends with “Don’t be the slave. Be the master.”

All that said, I do think there’s value in writing about how entitled white men behave, so everyone else can make informed decisions to act similarly in some circumstances, and to protect yourself from this behavior in others.

Acting entitled in order to jump a line makes you an asshole, but acting entitled can be a helpful tool in fighting against injustice — that is, when you are entitled. Or when no one’s entitled — you want to suggest yourself as an intern for an internship program that does not yet exist — so you might as well give it a shot.

When functioning within institutions putatively committed to diversity and fairness, acting entitled can be effective for many types of people. We’ve all heard that “women don’t ask” for raises. We should. Students who need disability accommodations from universities are encouraged to constantly advocate for themselves. Simply assuming that OBVIOUSLY you will be provided with accommodations — and acting confused but polite until you receive them — might work when dealing with a modern, liberally-minded university system.

There are other situations in which acting entitled — or acting like you belong at all, even when you do — can have serious consequences for people who lack privilege. Trayon Christian dared to spend his hard-earned money on a nice belt. It probably wouldn’t work out so well for him to have played at Bank of America’s ping-pong table for an hour.

I think there’s value in sharing with everyone the attitudes and expectations that privileged people use to operate in the world. I often recommend that everybody, at every income level, read one copy of Forbes sometime, just to get an idea of how the rich think about money. (For instance, the word “income,” as used in Forbes, doesn’t mean “money you get from your job.” It means the money that is generated from your investments, which you can often live off of — or better — without doing what most of us would call “work.” Whether you want to be the people in Forbes or you want to be armed to do battle with them, it’s helpful to know how the 1% thinks.)

But the right way to talk about this — about “ruling your world” with mind-control (and servicepeople-control) techniques — involves acknowledging structural barriers that allow some people to do this while punishing others for trying. And it involves a healthy discussion of whether we should.

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