It took about forty years before Frank Miller rationalized Batman wearing a huge target on his chest. (He can’t armor his head.) But as I was watching the first episode of Naruto today, I was struck by how quickly they demonstrated the silliness of ninjas wearing big, round bullseyes in the centers of their backs.

(Particularly in a universe where shurikens are apparently the size of small Japanese cars.)

But when I stopped to think about it, I realized (in my own little Milleresque fashion), that it might not be a mistake after all: These are members of a fierce, warrior-centric culture. They’re supposed to stand bravely in the face of danger. And what’s the quickest way to make sure your soldiers never turn and run?

Put a huge target on their back.

…

What? You were expecting something profound?

Fine.

(1) When creating a fictional world, what can you include that seems deliberately odd by our modern and cultural understanding of the world? The oddity will draw the attention of your players/readers/viewers, allowing you to reveal some deeper truth about the setting. And once it has been explained, the oddity will (by its very nature) stick in the memory (along with its associated truth).

(2) I may be underestimating Masashi Kishimoto, but I’m guessing he didn’t give any more thought to the placement of that logo/bullseye than “that looks cool”. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value to be found in my explanation of it. Attempting to rationalize the incoherent can give rise to fresh and creative ideas.

When I’m using published modules I am almost always forced to adapt them to the cosmology of my own campaign world. For example, in my primary D&D campaign setting there is only one pantheon of gods. Trying to adapt adventures designed for the typical multi-pantheism of D&D can pose some unique challenges. But I welcome the challenge because the effort of rationalizing the incoherency between world and adventure results in a richer and deeper understanding of the world. It’s given rise to saint cults, lineages of holy artifacts, regional factionalism, heresy rituals, and more — and rather than defracting or detracting from the world, all of these elements instead become refined and concentrated.

(And this can flow both ways: For example, the conflict between the Imperial Church and the Reformist Churches in my campaign world frequently allow me to re-purpose church-vs-church material from published scenarios. But this will also frequently enrich individual adventures by introducing avenues of friction and tension which would otherwise be atypical.)

The real world is made up of diverse and often contradictory viewpoints, cultural traditions, and personal opinions. By injecting and adapting material created by others, some degree of that balance between the coherent and the incoherent which can be found in the real world is brought into the game world.

A couple days ago I talked about the Long Con of DRM and the inherent ethical and cultural problems with embracing (or even accepting) DRM systems.

When this topic comes up, people often mention Valve’s Steam as a counter-example of how to “do it right”.

They’re half right. Steam has taken the onerous nature of DRM and turned it into a feature by allowing you to access your Steam account and play your games from any computer in the world. The system also, obviously, allows you to buy games online and have them instantly delivered.

In other words, people don’t (generally) complain about Steam because the platform gives you the ability to do something that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. I can understand (and share) the appreciation of that added value.

On the other hand, all of these features could be offered without DRM which requires the copy I currently have downloaded to my computer to be periodically re-validated. (DrivethruRPG does it.) And any game that you buy in a box at your local store and then need to validate through Steam’s servers before playing is every bit as bad as every other online activation schema in terms of its long-term impact on consumer rights.

Make no mistake: The Half-Life 2 box I have on the shelf contains nothing but a worthless coaster on the day that Valve goes out of business or migrates to Steam 2.0. And the Orange Box I purchased through Steam directly will become nothing more than wasted hard drive space only a few days later.

The features Steam offers to the consumer are the reason I’m willing to occasionally buy games through the service. But the unethical DRM that they’ve made part of their service is the reason that I rarely do so. And if there is any other method of purchase available, I’ll avail myself of it.

Unfortunately, the PC gaming industry’s increasing reliance on draconian DRM is the reason that all my game purchases in the past 3 years have either been indie games or console games.

Frank Pearce, executive producer of Starcraft II and co-founder of Blizzard, told Videogamer.com:

“The best approach from our perspective is to make sure that you’ve got a full-featured platform that people want to play on, where their friends are, where the community is.

“That’s a battle that we have a chance in. If you start talking about DRM and different technologies to try to manage it, it’s really a losing battle for us, because the community is always so much larger, and the number of people out there that want to try to counteract that technology, whether it’s because they want to pirate the game or just because it’s a curiosity for them, is much larger than our development teams.

“We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology.”

This statement makes perfect sense.

First, the only people DRM actually hurts are legitimate customers. The pirates, after all, strip the DRM off the games and no longer have to deal with any of its hassles.

Second, even if a foolproof system of DRM were to be created (and Ubisoft may be coming close by treating single player games as if they were multiplayer games), the nature of DRM is deeply inimical to the rights of common citizens. You have a right to the fair use of copyrighted material you buy, and DRM strips you of those rights.

Third, Pearce’s assessment is correct: The best way to encourage people to be legitimate customers instead of pirates is to (a) make them want to be your customer and (b) offer a superior product. DRM gets in the way of both goals.

So Frank Pearce is absolutely right: DRM is a losing battle.

From the same article:

Starcraft II, due out on July 27, requires a one-off activation and a registered Battle.net account.

Online activation?

That’s what DRM is.

In fact, it’s exactly the sort of onerous DRM system which is inherently unethical.

It suffers from the same problem as all activation-based DRM: If Blizzard goes out of business or decides to shut down their activation servers, the installation DVD becomes a worthless coaster.

My current car is a Saturn Ion. GM recently shut down their Saturn divison. Imagine if my car needed to call up the (now defunct) Saturn Activation Servers every time I put the key in the ignition. Would any sane person tolerate that?

Ah, but Blizzard’s system is so much more reasonable, right? My Ion only needs to contact the Saturn Activation Server once and it’ll work forever… until my battery dies (or, in the cast of Starcraft 2, I need to reinstall the software). I replace the battery only to discover that the activation servers are gone and — ta-da! — my car is worthless.

And here we see the long con of DRM:

One of the first big efforts to push out activation-based DRM was the DIVX disc format: Buy a DIVX disc for cold hard cash. Then, whenever you want to watch it, pay another $4. And the disc would only play if your DIVX player was plugged into a phone line and connected with the DIVX activation servers.

Fortunately, people weren’t stupid: They flocked to the DVD format. Even though the discs were more expensive, people were willing to pay more in order to be able to control their own access to and use of their privately owned movie libraries. Even after DIVX abandoned its re-activation fees (while still offering cheaper discs), people stuck with the DRM-free DVD standard. And everyone who was stupid enough to buy DIVX was punished (as all supporters of DRM formats are inevitably punished): The DIVX servers were shut down in 2001 and all of those movies people had bought turned into coasters.

But now DRM is beginning to see wider and wider acceptance, particularly in the gaming market. And one of the reasons can be seen in Frank Pearce’s bald-faced lie: The game publishers have been pushing ever more onerous versions of DRM. They’re trying to see just how far they can go before public becomes completely outraged, and then they’ll pull back.

But they don’t actually pull back all the way: They just pull back a bit. And everyone cheers because Blizzard says DRM is a waste of time and they won’t have any DRM on Starcraft II… despite the fact they still have DRM on Starcraft II.

That’s the long con.

The game publishers are treating us all like lobsters and they’re trying to boil us alive by slowly raising the temperature of the pot.

And make no mistake. If you’re sucker enough to fall for it, you will boil alive. Because even if the corporations stick around, they aren’t going to keep the servers active: Everyone who bought DRM-laden songs from MSN Music got screwed in 2008 when Microsoft shut down the servers.

I own a vast library of media: Thousands of books, CDs, movies, and computer games line the walls of my home. And the majority of them were published by companies that no longer exist. Which means that if those products required an activation server for me to use them, they would be useless to me. (Not to mention all the other books, albums, movies, and games which were produced by companies who would no longer be supporting the activation servers for them.)

So as much as I’d like to play Starcraft II, I won’t be. And I encourage you to do the same. Because if you’re willing to support the publishing companies in taking away your own rights, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself when you get screwed.

This, like pretty much everything Google does, is really cool. But either I’m becoming an old fogey, or the fact that Google continues to make us more and more reliant on content that exists only on their servers makes me nervous.

In pondering the implications of the AIs in Greg Egan’s Diaspora immersing themselves so completely in virtual realities that they forgot about the real world, I found a simple saying: “You should never forget where your plug is.” The virtual reality may be indistinguishable from the real world in every way while being filled with endless possibilities far beyond the scope of anything the real world may be able to offer: But if the sun goes supernova in the real world, you’re still going to die, no matter how deeply nestled you’ve become in your artificial life.

In reflecting on cloud computing I think it’s equally important to say: “You should never forget where your data is.”

Because the “cloud” is increasingly becoming a buzz word that means, “If Google ever goes away or chooses to shut down a server or decides to start charging for a service, then you’re all screwed.”

Don’t get me wrong: I use GMail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader. I watch videos on Youtube. I search prices on Froogle. Google Books (along with the Internet Archive) is literally revolutionary in making information widely and rapidly accessible. I’m even convinced that Google Wave has the opportunity to replace e-mail. (Although, notably, one of the reasons I believe that is because Wave is an open protocol and not dependent on Google’s servers.)

But whenever I hear about somebody who has lost their entire blog because their hosting company has gone out of business or failed to back up their servers properly, I’m reminded of the importance of knowing where your data is. The Alexandrian, for example, is actually designed so that the primary copy of every document is kept on my local computer. The website itself is the first of several back-ups. And even though that isn’t an option for many blogs, you should still make a point of making a local back-up on a regular basis.

The same applies to anyone who’s keeping their data exclusively on Google Docs, Flickr, Facebook, or anywhere else on the web. The utility of being able to access and manipulate your data from anywhere is great, but the importance of both knowing and controlling the physical location of your data just cannot be stressed enough.

Which is why, for example, I can’t get excited for Google Chrome OS. In fact, it’s why I can’t figure out why anybody is excited about it. This is an operating system which fails to offer even a single unique feature: Everything it can do, other operating systems already do. In fact, the only thing it can uniquely claim to do is to make your computer completely reliant on the “cloud” — in other words, to force you to give up your control over your own data. For some reason this is supposed to be a “feature”, but I can’t fathom what advantage anyone thinks they’re going to get out of it.

The worst writing I have ever read.

(And I write that as someone who has suffered through multiple readings of the Eye of Argon.)

A sample:

Her hair had the sheen of the sea beneath an eclipsed moon. It was the color of a leopard’s tongue, of oiled mahogany. It was terra cotta, bay and chestnut. Her hair was a helmet, a hood, the cowl of the monk, magician or cobra.

Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon. The scent of fresh snow. Her eyes were dark birds in fresh snow. They were the birds’ shadows, they were mirrors; they were the legends on old charts. They were antique armor and the tears of dragons. Her brows were a raptor’s sharp, anxious wings. They were a pair of scythes. Her ears were a puzzle carved in ivory. Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips.

You really have to read it out loud to appreciate just how mind-numbingly awful it is. I found, when reading it to myself, that my subconscious brain just started skimming over things. It was only when I started reading it out loud that the Cthulhuian mind-rending began.

This is taken, by the way, from a published novel: Silk and Steel by Ron Miller.

I’m also fairly enamored of this pictorial rendition of the subject of the passage (although you really need to click through and read the full thing to appreciate it fully).

This has been making the rounds for a couple of months now, so I’m probably not the first person to note the similarity between this misbegotten narrative excess and the Song of Solomon. I suspect this is not merely an accidental resemblance: One of the characters, you’ll note, is named Spikenard. While many reading the passage dismiss this as merely some horrible fantasy name, Spikenard is actually the name of a flower which is mentioned twice in the Song of Solomon.

By pure synchronicity, a couple of days after reading this for the first time, I was reading 3:16 – Bible Text Illuminated by Donald E. Knuth, which expanded insightfully on the topic while discussing the Song of Solomon (pg. 96):

These songlets are examples of an ancient type of love poem called a wa?f, in which a beloved’s body is praised part by part, often making use of extravagant and far-fetched metaphors. For example, an Egyptian papyrus from about 1250 B.C. contains a fragment of a wa?f that says, “my sister’s mouth is a lotus; her breasts are mandrakes”. Wa?f songs appear several times in the Thousand and One Nights, and they are still popular in modern Arab poetry. A 19th-century wa?f includes the line: “Her bosom is like polished marble tablets, as ships bring them to Sidon; like pomegranates topped with piles of glittering jewels.”

So there is clearly a very specific effect that Ron Miller is going for. Does this make it better? Not really. I’d even argue it makes it worse. Miller has clearly put a lot of thought and care into rendering something that, in its actual execution, ends up being a mockery of the very thing it sought to create.

Understanding what Miller was attempting to create helps us to understand where it all went horribly, horribly wrong. But the skidmarks don’t negate the car crash.