It’s true, the recession is upon us – and it’s international. The global market has us all lashed to one another, and our little raft is taking on water. Think you can escape the crunch by fleeing to the UK, or to Australia? Perhaps you think this is 1908, sonny-boy, but you’re out of expatriatic luck. Truth is there’s only one ladder out of this international swamp, and that ladder is spelled Dubai.

Yes, glorious Dubai, golden Dubai, great champion of commerce Dubai. Dubai, UAE, is hermetically sealed by an invisible bubble of wealth that acts like any other greenhouse; money comes in but money DOES NOT LEAVE. In Dubai the streets are paved with platinum. This is not any ostentatious display of wealth – the fact is that Dubai has just too much platinum to go around, so now it ends up on the streets and on the soles of my shoes.

Yes, I did just say my shoes. I am writing this to you from Dubai. Although I am in the lower 10th percentile of wealth here in Dubai, as compared to global wealth, to your wealth, I am a money god. Everybody here is! We’re just so sick & tired of hearing about your troubles, economic or otherwise, and also your democratic primary. Whenever news of your world comes in through my golden radio I pick up my diamond hammer and I smash that golden radio into shards, which the children play with before discarding because here, in Dubai, it literally is not worth our time to bend down and pick that gold up.

I buy the Times each morning, even though I also read it sporadically through the day for free on the internet. I do this because I am a fabulously rich man, but with the recession this will soon change, and it’s time that we stopped spending money on words. There are so many words to be found online! But there’s also so much that won’t be found online, so many wonderful things that you must pay for. Of course soon that won’t matter because we’ll be wheeling around our currency in wheelbarrows, and only people with valuable services to trade (doctors, farmers, graphic designers) will be able to acquire new books.

In response, we’re creating a lending library at 801A. Contribute a book to our library, and you can have borrowing rights, which will serve you well when you need to burn things in order to keep warm.

Tip #3: Don’t have kids.

Kids cost money. According to common knowledge, they cost upwards of $17,000 a year. Do you have a spare nearly 20 grand lying around? Perhaps you’d like to spend it on Legos and child-size skateboards that linger, unused, in the garage. In place of the car you had to sell. Or perhaps you’d like to just sign your paycheck over to Spongebob Squarepants? (He also takes Visa.)

Also, kids bring guilt. You’ve got to feed them something other than rice and beans and cheap scotch. This is a fine (even recommended) diet for a bachelor or barren couple, but kids require pre-packaged Kid Food that comes in neon colors and funny shapes, so don’t do it.

It’s Restaurant Week here in the bountiful borough of Brooklyn, and so today we upped our lunch level. For a very reasonable flat fee, we took advantage of the finest restaurant floating on a barge underneath the Brooklyn Bridge (a neighborhood we lovingly refer to as DUBBO), the River Café.

Notes on living large:

• Although there is an initial shock of the fancy fancy new (men’s outfits varied between suits with pocket squares and suits without, and then Sloat and I) that quickly fades away. Although they do play opera in the entrance foyer.

• When you get up to go to the bathroom, a server suddenly materializes at your table and quickly places a cover over your food to keep it from getting cold. I can only assume the cover is made from silver, possibly platinum.

• Crumb scrapers are used to prepare the table for dessert, which frankly isn’t so fancy our servants used to do this all the time back when I was little.

Let’s break our orders down! All photographs taken (covertly, so as not to look gauche like picture-snapping peasants) with Andrew’s iPhone.

Pressman:
1 glass Merlot
Smoked Salmon with Crispy Scallops
Crispy Duck with Sweet Potato Purée

Renda:
1 glass Pinot Noir
Beef Salad
Crispy Duck with sweet potato puree

Andrew:
1 glass Iced Tea
Beef Salad without beef
Scottish Salmon

Holly:
1 glass Dolcetto
Lamb Meatballs
Scottish Salmon
1 espresso

And for dessert, we all had a medley of creme brulee, some sort of chocolate mousse, and pineapple sorbet.

Then Holly got on her motorcycle and made us all walk home.

Sweet ride, Gressley.

Unlike some people in the studio, however, I’m not opposed to video games. I certainly won’t claim any as art, but I’d hold a few up as entertainment of the highest order; wholly engaging mental exercises.

My boyhood loyalty lies with the now-obsolete text games released by Infocom in the early 1980s (though I didn’t play them until ’87 or so, when my family bought our first beige wonder, the Apple IIGS). In these games, the user navigates through a written narrative consisting entirely of dialogue and descriptions. All action occurs at a command line at the bottom of the screen, where a stripped-down syntax is used to interact with the story.

These are, far and away, the toughed games I’ve ever played – one taxing logic puzzle after another. Or illogic puzzle, really; the majority of these games were being written by programmers with a taste for the wacky non-sequitor. An example:

The ambassador wheezes loudly and hands you a brochure outlining his planet's major exports.
> look at the brochure

"The leading export of Blow'k-bibben-Gordo is the adventure game *** PLANETFALL *** written by S. Eric Meretzky. Buy one today. Better yet, buy a thousand."

The ambassador offers you a bit of celery.
> eat the celery

Oops. Looks like Blow'k-Bibben-Gordoan metabolism is not compatible with our own. You die of all sorts of convulsions.

*** You have died ***

That was taken from the popular game “Planetfall” (1983, Infocom), in which you play a man in space. I’m not sure exactly what you’re doing up there in space, because I kept dying before the plot got good. The text-only nature of these games meant that there was little chance of you accidentally solving a problem, because a successful action was the result of a very deliberate series of commands. This made it impossible to luck your way through, or to complete the thing on auto-pilot.

Incidentally, if you’d like to play Planetscape, there’s a java version here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/planetfall.html. If you’ve got a spare two or three weeks you stand a chance of beating it.

…

By the time my family had a computer, the text adventure era had mostly come and gone; the advent of computers such as the Amiga (and the EGA graphics it allowed) paved the way for graphically sophisticated animated games. The keyboard was used to navigate through the crude cartoon world, although the actual interface still relied on written commands – “open door”, “push button”, “give beer to child”, etc. The image below is taken from Space Quest (Sierra On-Line, 1986), a game I never really played but from the looks of things involves robots and shopping.

The command line gameplay that these games were structured around was soon replaced by an entirely mouse-based interface commonly referred to as Point-and-Click. Although entirely visual, this new interface was still structured around the application of verbs to nouns – but instead of typing “look at car”, the user clicked the “look” icon and then clicked on the car.

Enough has been written about the semantic leap from language to icon inherent in graphic user interfaces – I’m not going to break any new ground in this essay. I will note, however, that compared to the unforgiving nature of the text adventure game, the point-and-click graphic interface was warm and encouraging, like the god of the New Testament. Your mistakes were forgiven.

The above screenshot is taken from Maniac Mansion (1987, LucasArts), a game that wore its love of b-movies right on its diskette sleeve. It featured a wide cast of playable characters, including Jeff (a blonde surfer dude), Bernard (an Ed Grimley lookalike with taped-up glasses), and the inimitable Razor, lead singer of the proto-riot grrrl group Razor and the Scummettes. (You bet they have a MySpace page! Check out the theme song, it’s killer.)

The third dimension killed point-and-click games – that’s the aphorism, anyway. The common argument being that 3d games encouraged a different mode of gameplay, a wandering-through-space that was never particularly kind on the genre. Maybe that’s true; by the time the last wave of point-and-click games came out I had given up on computer games all together.

I’d argue that what really killed the genre, however, was the growing dominance of video game consoles – the Playstation, the Nintendo, the Xbox – with their miniature joysticks and multi-button configurations. There’s something inherently clumsy about pointing and clicking when the input device allows for neither.

…

That’s not to say that there are no longer any computer games worth playing. I think I’ve just lost my patience for most of them – the majority are twitchy, hyper-kinetic reflex exercises. For me, the stimulation quickly wears off; I’m left feeling mentally depleted.

I do still like the games that require me to focus on reasoning rather than reflex – especially the ones which present a cohesive world with its own set of rules. If this world and its mechanics are elegantly constructed, the user can be left to extrapolate or intuit the full range of gameplay possibilities from the initial rule set. An awesome and diverting example is the first-person game Portal (2006, Valve).

In Portal, the user must navigate a series of increasingly complex environments using a teleportation device; create an entrance portal on one wall and an exit portal on another, and then step through the opening to step out of the exit. Through elegant game design and clever voice-over from the omniscient antagonist/narrator, the user quickly learns to rely upon the fact that forward momentum is not stalled by travel through portals. Once the mechanics of portal manipulation have been intuited, the game becomes one thrilling rebuttal to physics after another.

In order to play Portal, you’ll need a souped-up PC, or an xbox 360 or Playstation 3 game console. Perhaps you do not have these things? Then I’ve got one final recommendation: Cursor*10 (2007, Nekogames). This is a Flash game that I do not want to unpack too explicitly, because the joy of playing comes partly from learning the rules. It deals with very specific conceits of time and repetition, and is as elegant a package as any online game I’ve come across.

…

People tell me they hate video games all the time, and their arguments are usually sound: The excessive violence and the aestheticization of suffering. The shift away from community and towards isolated self-pleasure. The terrifying and weird desire to live in a simulation, turning away from a real world with real sensations, with genuine and unmoderated and undesigned experiences, already packed with tremendous beauty and strangeness.

I think all of the above are true, and your standard critique of video game culture plays out like a page from Society of the Spectacle. I’m not a cheerleader or a champion of the medium – I just find some games to be rewarding recreational experiences.

But what is the ideal game? Maybe it’s one which allows for a constant re-evaluation of rules, where the players can mutually agree to expand or contract the boundaries as they see fit, turning each iteration of the game into a critique or defense of itself.

That doesn’t sound thrilling to you? Well, it’s just a hope, an open-ended model which could be applied to any of a number of possible game scenarios. Next time you’re at my house, let’s try it out. We don’t even need to untangle cords, find the controllers, or figure out how to plug this into that. We’ll get out the Axis & Allies board, figure out a better way to play. Or we’ll just pick up a deck of cards and start from there.

What Type are you?

“Boys often classify and describe girls according to the way the girls act around them: Shy, A Flirt, A Pal, Natural.”Here is a breakdown of the four types of girls:

• a SHY girl “may have wonderful things to say, but she’s afraid to express herself. No one will ever get to know her if she runs from the spotlight when it shines on her.”

• a PAL will sometimes “hide behind her torn jeans and baseball glove because she’s afraid of risking a boy-girl relationship.”

• a NATURAL girl “may resort to flirting on occasion, but she can be a good friend, too. She is sincerely sympathetic and can be serious or funny depending upon her real emotions.”

• a FLIRT’s “main concerns are her clothes and looks, and her main preoccupation is getting a guy’s interest at any cost.”

Below, Andy, Andrew, Renda and Holly are typified.

Andy is natural! But shy – and, it should be noted, a totally rotten flirt. Without a single flirtatious outfit in his closet! And that’s what TeenWorks picked up on: AP’s inconspicuous fashion sense. Apparently blue jeans, a button-up and a sweater makes for the Shyest Outfit of All (a title that reads like a Belle & Sebastian b-side), because AP was consistently docked points for having the most wallflowered fashion sense. Highlight: “Your style of dressing is ordinary and drab!”

Andrew, on the other hand, is one heckuva pal – naturally. Sure, they laugh at his jokes and enjoy his cutting up, his clowning around. But if Sloat wants them to know that he has a gentle and romantic side, he’s gotta cut the mock insults and talk about his ideas and feelings. Highlight: “Wear a dress occasionally!”

Renda is a bit shy, a bit of a pal, a bit of a natural gal – anything but a flirt. Highlight: “You’re having trouble with the lock on your bike. Three guys from your class walk by and offer to help. Renda says, ‘I don’t need help. I can do it myself.’” Sorry boys!

Holly is the only one of us showing the slightest tendency to flirt. Sure, she’s a bit of a natural, and has moments bordering on shy, but mostly it’s just wink, laugh, lightly touch you on the shoulder. Whoa! Highlight: “Your style of dressing is frilly, flouncy and tight!” Yes!

This is an idea that I’ve been kicking around for a long time now, but never to the point where I’m satisfied enough to move forward. I’ll share it now, though, just to get it off my chest.

The aim is to develop a publication that would “come into itself” over the course of assembly. An exercise/experiment in the editorial process, it will be made up of numerous contributions from a variety of participants. Each contributor will receive everything that has come before, and will be given ample time to spend with the whole-to-date, so that the entirety will be internalized prior to the development of a new contribution.

Each new piece will not (necessarily) be a response to the piece directly prior, but instead should be written with a sense of the publication as a whole to date. Contributions are to be understood as anything that will function in print – essays, photography, art, misdirections, musical scores, etc.

And then on to the next person. So that with each contribution the publication grows more unified and more complex. Over the course of the project an organic whole will be built.

There are problems with this structure. It is infeasible, increasingly so with each new contribution.

Is the selection of each contributor the only top-down editorial choice made? And who wants to be the last person to contribute? Straddled with a stitched-together Frankenstein of a magazine, the texts and images all tugging in different directions?

What I neglected to mention is that a while ago I found a program that grants me this isolated writing space, free from the tyranny of the visual interface: WriteRoom, from Hog Bay Software. I use it to compose emails, keep notes, write assessments of projects, etc. It goes without saying that it’s the word processor in which I composed this blog entry. It has become a very comfortable friend.

WR occupies your entire screenspace, giving you nothing but an empty zone for words to occupy. It does not format. It does not make tables. It will not output to HTML. It sticks to a very strict idea of what a word processor is. There is no visual interface to speak of, save a blinking cursor block. A word count will fade into view if the mouse is placed in the corner of the screen. A scrollbar is also invisible, off to the side, until called into use.

And that’s it. Nothing but possibility. All your other programs are hidden from view; nothing gets through its inky black space (or royal blue or lush green – the background color is adjustable).

Actually, according to the marketing material and public testemonials, the main selling point of Write Room is that it takes up your entire screen, thus freeing you from distractions. No bouncing IMs, no iTunes, no e-mail notifications. As one review puts it, “This is an awesome app! Without distractions, I was able to pump out a few blog posts in about half the time it normally takes.” Whether this is a desired state of affairs is a question left unanswered.

Welcome back to the Patent Office! Here are some ideas I’ve had for 15m radio dramas:

The night before
he can’t remember
wakes up but can’t see
now what

Two guys are racing on foot through a very crowded city. It’s the day of a festival – everyone’s out in costumes and singing songs, playing ball, having street BBQs. It is clear that the first man who reaches the river wins something tangible, that there is more at stake here than just pride.
The men begin the race far apart, so they never know where the other is in relation – whether he’s closing in on you, or taking a totally different route, or even whether he’s reached the finish line.
We follow one of the two men over the course of the race. The city is heavily secured, with travel between one zone and another a locked-down transaction of papers and assurances. Every few minutes, the man reaches another zone.

AND

He weaves through the city – running next to the animals that have been brought out to march the streets, the elephants and the zebras, and the high school bands, and the general pandemonium. He begins to realize that the man he’s racing is somewhere nearby, maybe he catches glimpses of him.

OR

The man gets lost

OR

He eats a hot dog

AND

he calls it a fucking day.

She’s been hired to babysit two teenagers too old to need a babysitter. They intimidate her, bully her, drive her into the attic. She cowers there, listening from the door as the two girls wreck havok in the house below.

A man tries to break an awkward habit of beginning all his conversations with outright lies. Each time he has to explain away or justify the lie before it gets out of control. After each encounter he engages himself in a righteous monologue about this habit.
–I can break this habit.
–Don’t lie to me, asshole!

A golfer is hitting nothing but holes-in-one and finds himself getting bored. He begins to take his time in between holes, drinking heavily. Soon he is a drunkard and is happy with his newfound freedom from perfection.

A day at the pool, culminating in a beautiful game of marco polo.

A man fancies himself a gourmand and goes to the market one day. He is single, and no longer young. While there he sees a young woman in line waiting for a duck. The man goes up and gets in line behind her, and begins to flirt. She hesitates, but he continues. He’s telling her his favorite duck recipe. As he does so, he begins to gather small ingredients off the racks around him, and starts a demonstration of the recipe.
Soon people gather to watch him prepare the recipe. The meal sounds mouth-watering. The woman, we can only assume, is as charmed as we are.

I’m talking, of course, about the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Yesterday, the bad boys of baseball finally announced that they were down with Jesus and dropped the “Devil” from their name. Ladies & gentlemen meet your The Tampa Bay Rays. They also showed off a new logo, a generic typographic treatment with a miniscule starburst element awkwardly dropped in right where the tail and the bowl of the R meet. If I had to guess, I’d say it was almost certainly designed by Todd Radom, the go-to guy MLB uses to keep uniforms looking uniform. Here’s a selection of logos he’s designed:

Unfortunately this isn’t the place to chart the birth, evolution, and eventual death-by-standardization of baseball logos. I’ll save that for my next little column about the crushing effects of design’s newfound ubiquity and the terrifying logical conclusion of a specialized design industry. Right now I just want an excuse to show my top ten (American) (major league) baseball logos!

A few notes before we begin: This is a list of logos, emblems, and marks – not of their utilization on uniforms. I’m as drawn to the stalwart bedrocks of baseball’s visual history as I am to the short-lived experiments and stunning outliers, but the majority of this list covers dead teams or hidden pasts of current franchises. There is no proper methodology I’m using here, but I do appreciate illustrative images with a certain vestigal evidence of amateurish origins. All images are taken from Chris Creamer’s amazing and exhaustive sportslogos.net.

10: New York Yankees (1936 – present)
I include this not because it’s one of my favorite logos, but just to note that the Yankees logo features a top hat covered in the stars and stripes. It might as well feature Steinbrenner in a three-piece suit clutching your rent check and beating up your kid brother.

9: St Louis Browns (1936 – 1951)
A really stellar logo of the sort rarely used in baseball, the traditional shield & logotype. Between the vertical lines, the color palette, and the figurative form, this feels like something out of the German football league, the Budesliga, which I may or may not have just spelled correctly. Clumsy in a charming way – the type, especially, is of an era where we just said of type, “fit ‘er in!”, and is not without its charm.

8: Toronto Blue Jays 1977-1996
Man do I love this logo, even though I do think it fails to streamline all the elements into one cohesive whole. There’s something very perfect about the red/blue/sky blue color palette, the inline type feels like a natural extension of baseball’s use of type, and the geometric bird face is so appealing. All the more so when compared to the current Blue Jays logo, which suffers from the unwritten law that any animal seen in a modern logo must be pissed off and, ideally, metallic.

7: Chicago Cubs 1949-1961
In the post-war era, as the balance of world powers began to shift, we briefly experimented with being the cutest nation on earth.

6: Philadelphia Phillies 1970-1991
Formally, pretty awesome.

5: Los Angeles Dodgers 1958-Present
When the Dodgers left Brooklyn, and broke my father’s little heart, they took with them a classic logotype upon which they wisely built. The logo was tilted, a meteoric baseball was added, and something genuinely graceful was born. The designers respected the past by adding a totally different element. One day I’ll write about the wonder of continuity and thoughtful change, but for now a nice and simple logo.

4: St Louis Cardinals 1960s-1990s
Picture it on baby blue. Later on they’d abandon the scotch typeface, but keep the great balancing cardinals. An illustrated logo that’s lasted the test of time and focus groups – a rare bird.

3: Montreal Expos 1961-1991
Amazingly, this logo is not meant to say ELB. It’s meant to be as E D and B, combining to form a big old M. Expos de Montreal Baseball. Roughly 25% of L train riders wear this ballcap at any given time.

2: Oakland Athletics 1988-present (though based off the old Philadelphia Athletics logo)
That elephant is balancing on a baseball!!!

1: Mr Met 1963-present
Then again, I’m biased.