Category Archives: Books

The ramifications of FaceTime (as discussed by David Foster Wallace)

Apple’s new iPhone 4 features a front-facing camera for video calling. It’s called “FaceTime.” If mobile platforms are slowly encroaching upon multimedia — first with cameras and now with video — how will the psychology of communication evolve?

And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattles your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses to do hair-check in the foyer mirror before answering the door.

But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers’ faces looked on their own TP screen, during calls. Not their callers’ faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair, after all, to use the TP’s cartridge-card’s Video-Record option to record both pulse in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actually looked like to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with the high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. (147)

But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy all sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand, with what appears to be an almost equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it becomes possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-mask thing spiralled totally out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look like, like whether you’re good-looking or not — e.g. try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not — but it turned out that consumers’ instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. (Wallace 148)

Taken from an earlier quote-post for my reading of Infinite Jest.

Posted on June 7, 2010 Also posted in Tech · , , , , · Comments closed

Defining self-publishing

The Wikipedia article on self-publishing is fairly extensive. I wasn’t aware of the various forms of self-publication or past authors that succeeded through their own means.

True self-publishing

True self-publishing means authors undertake the entire cost of publication themselves, and handle all marketing, distribution, storage, etc. All rights remain with the author, the completed books are the writer’s property, and the writer gets all the proceeds of sales. Self-publishing can be more cost-effective than vanity or subsidy publishing and can result in a much higher-quality product, because authors can put every aspect of the process out to bid rather than accepting a preset package of services.

While it’s likely to be old hat, I’m quite proud that I was able to endure all the challenges of creating a book from scratch.

Posted on May 5, 2010 in Books · , · Comments closed

Q&A with William Gibson

William Gibson’s new novel, Zero History, will be out on September 7th, 2010. Since March 31st, he’s been answering questions on his blog and there are a lot of insightful answers to his methodology and internal processes. Part one and part two.

Q: Which novels did you enjoy writing most?
A: Writing novels is a painful and anxiety-ridden process, for me. There are *moments* of enjoyment. I very much enjoy the state of having written.

Q: Least?
A: They’re all equally if differently painful, and each one seems, at some point, to me, to be not only a very bad novel, but the worst novel ever written. That crisis, I’ve learned, indicates that I’ll be finished soon, and that the worst is over. But knowing that doesn’t seem to decrease that devastating and absolute conviction of utter failure.

Even the greats suffer from self-doubt.

Posted on April 12, 2010 in Books · , , · Comments closed

Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking

And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattles your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses to do hair-check in the foyer mirror before answering the door.

But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers’ faces looked on their own TP screen, during calls. Not their callers’ faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair, after all, to use the TP’s cartridge-card’s Video-Record option to record both pulse in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actually looked like to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with the high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. (147)

But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy all sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand, with what appears to be an almost equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it becomes possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-mask thing spiralled totally out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look like, like whether you’re good-looking or not — e.g. try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not — but it turned out that consumers’ instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. (148)

Posted on January 5, 2010 in Books · , , , · Comments closed

Thinking about themselves

That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. (203 – 204)

Posted on September 7, 2009 in Books · , , , · Comments closed

Substances

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that. (201)

Posted on September 1, 2009 in Books · , , , · Comments closed

Fanatic

‘As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.’

Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. ‘Herrrrrre we go.’

Marathe ignored this. ‘Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’ (Wallace, 107)

Posted on July 22, 2009 in Books · , , , · Comments closed

25 year anniversary of Neuromancer

Macworld takes a look back at Neuromancer, by William Gibson, and compares truth with fiction to see what has become a reality since its publication in 1984. I’ve always loved the juxtaposition between small trivia about Mr. Gibson and the work he produces.

Apparently Gibson had very little knowledge of technology and computers.

Despite, or possibly because of this, his vision has proved to be stunningly plausible.

Although I can’t say for certain this is true, when I met him last year he had expressed that until much later in his life he was adverse to technology.

Posted on July 6, 2009 Also posted in Links · , , , · Comments closed

Worst mornings

I’ll be quoting passages from Infinite Jest that I really enjoy while participating in Infinite Summer.

The worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light — the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer. (46)

Posted on June 25, 2009 in Books · , , , · Comments closed