Being a geek of a certain age, I of course went out to see Tron: Legacy as soon as it opened in the theaters. And being a geek of a certain type, and having listened to Wendy Carlos‘ ethereal soundtrack to the original Tron, I also purchased the soundtrack to this one as soon as it was available. This was my first introduction to Daft Punk, whom (I must admit) I first even heard of when their role was announced to much rejoicing. On receipt of the CD (yes, I still buy physical goods from time to time), I learned that they had worked on the orchestration with Hans Zimmer, a composer whose other cinematic work I do know and enjoy.

I say all this to make clear that I cannot evaluate the album as to its “Daft Punkness”. On my first listen through, I was underwhelmed. Wendy Carlos notwithstanding, I am not much of a fan of techno, and this album is certainly that. But having spent the cash I gave it a few good listens, and then I noticed that I was replaying the music in my head throughout the day. That’s just about the best recommendation you can give an album: it’s something you want to keep listening to. It evokes the movie (which I very much enjoyed) without being dogmatically tied to it. I’ve played these tracks for more than anything I’ve purchased in the past year or so.

That’s not to say the album is perfect. Again, bear in mind that all I know of techno is an outsider’s impression; it’s not my cup of tea. But the soundtrack encapsulates why it’s not my cup of tea. Daft Punk is very good at mood-setting and crafting almost subliminal music cues and then building them up. But this album is too much crescendo and too little climax: Too many tracks simply don’t pay off, dribbling away into subtle but ultimately disappointing whimpers. To be fair, this is a criticism applicable to most movie orchestration; after all, the music is fundamentally infrastructure on which a scene is hung. It’s not supposed to attract your attention and it isn’t telling the story itself. Especially in a visual medium such as movie-making, there tends to be an emphasis on crescendo: The scene wants to build tension which is generally then released abruptly with transition to the next scene. (Certainly the action genre, of which Tron: Legacy is an example, follows this pattern.) So the music builds for the big reveal, and then dashes to the next cue.

All of that said, it is this no-there-there quality of most tracks that I find most dissatisfying about the album. Daft Punk does a nice job with the rising action and are masters of the building overlay, where the same riff is repeated many times, but each repetition adds a new instrument or variation. By the tenth or so cycle, the output is quite complex and rich. But once the end of the scene comes, the payoff is usually just one abrupt transition to a fadeout; and that is unsatisfying, especially when encountered over and over.

Nonetheless the soundtrack worked its way into my brain and I found myself often putting it on when I needed instrumental music in the background. It turns out that this album is far more effective when heard out of the corner of your ear, rather than faced directly head-on. Once I got past the newness of the genre and made peace with the crescendo/climax issue, I was able to appreciate the subtleties. One surprise, for me, was that the bombastic big-picture stuff is not the album’s strengths. There are some quite gentle and quite beautiful pieces to be found, such as “Adagio for Tron” and “Father and Son“. They serve as nice counterpoints to the more driven mood music of the rest of the movie. They also allow the audience to come up for air and find the emotional core of the movie, which is always at risk of being lost among the neon action.

It is fair to say that the album succeeds in capturing (and creating) the mood of its progenitor film. After listening to the album for nearly a month, I went back to re-watch Tron: Legacy in the theater. My familiarity with the music definitely enhanced my experience of the film. Daft Punk does seem to have a cinematic intuition; the music evokes the action, as it should. Despite not knowing the soundtrack, it still did not drown out the film. It lies safely underneath what is happening on screen, the audio substrate but not a distraction, just as it should be. Perhaps the only place where that really fails is during the End of Line Club scenes, wherein Daft Punk appear as digital versions of themselves and their music on this album is closest to the club-thumping techno for which they’ve earned their fame. Maybe I’m just a oldster but this is the least engaging part of the movie and of the soundtrack.

Being versed in the released album also let me notice the musical cues that aren’t to be found on the CD. Clearly there are always artistic choices to be made and decisions to face. I did discover the haunting “Father and Son” interlude, cut from the album but happily available online via the Apple iTunes store. I wonder if the decision was artistic or commercial — perhaps they wanted to tap multiple revenue stream? In any case the omission lessens the official soundtrack. Likewise, there are apparently tracks available on an import CD but not in the States. I’m a big Tron fan but I’m not spending another $40 to get five tracks.

Daft Punk have said that Wendy Carlos was a major influence on their own style, and that comes through. No one would mistake this soundtrack for hers, but then, no one would mistake Tron: Legacy for Tron, so that’s OK. Much like the visuals of the movie, the soundtrack has been updated and evolved. I do wish that, perhaps, they had included just one or two more direct homages (all we get is a brief rendition of the iconic Tron motif by Kevin Flynn) but that is really more nitpicking than anything else.

Final verdict? This album was definitely worth the time to listen and the money to buy. It’s already worked its way into my rotation of instrumental/soundtrack playlists and I expect I’ll be replaying it for a long time.Православни икони

dropbox is one of my favorite “cloud” utilities.  It keeps a directory synchronized across many computers, allowing remote access and automatic backup.  Whenever you set up dropbox on a new computer, all of the files need to be copied across.  As you might imagine, this can take some time.  Usually, dropbox pops up a little balloon telling you how many files are left and about how long it will take.  But if you are syncing a huge amount of data…

… well, you get the message below.

Metatropolis Edited by Jack Scalzi Rating on an arbitrary 5-point scale: 4 out of 5

Metatropolis is a science fiction anthology exploring, as it claims, the “future of cities”.  That’s not strictly accurate. It’s really a collection of stories that explore the question: If we as a species are going to survive the mistakes of our forebears (particularly ecological mistakes), what will human society have to look like?  It’s pretty clear that we won’t be able to ratchet up world living standards to the stereotypical 2.4 kids in the suburbs mid American ideal.  Resources are too finite and indeed running out.  If our profligate carbon society doesn’t right itself soon, if we face a Century of Judgment, then what will emerge from the drowned coasts and droughted interiors?

The five authors (Jack Scalzi, Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and Karl Schroeder) don’t really offer blueprints and white papers, of course.  They off five distinct tales, appropriately interdependent, that explore a possible future.  This is a shared world on the model of Aspirin’s Thieves’ World, though not quite so sprawling or tightly woven.  It is clear that the authors spent considerable time together thrashing out their shared world — though, in keeping with the theme, much of that might have been online and virtual.

So, does the book succeed?

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Addressing craft first, I’d have to say Yes.  The stories are uniformly well-written and engaging.  They each contain a nice mix of philosophizing and action, abstraction and characterization.  Each story has its own voice, as might be expected of an anthology; but even within a story the characters seems multidimensional and believable.  The slow-drip despair of the mid-to-late 21st century comes through nicely.  The world is running down and, for most of the main characters, that is their primary experience of it.  Each story includes a glimpse at what might replace the worn-out consumerist world; each story is a voyage of discovery.

As to the ideas behind the stories:  Most of the time, that works too.  While the thrust of each story is sustainability, there is no myopic utopian fantasies here.  The authors recognize that survival will come not from going back but going forward. In contrast to the environmental dystopias of, say, the 1970s, these authors understand that a call to abandon all technology will not be heeded by the mass of humanity; and, realistically, billions will not lay down and die to redress a balance they did not themselves upset.

Nonetheless, the citizens of these zero-footprint enclaves invariably come off as a tad, well, smug.  Perhaps they have the right to be, since they have unlocked a key to survival while most of the world burns and drowns.  But to present-day ears, it sounds a bit thin.  There is a steady undercurrent of derision and mockery for the “big society” thinking that got the world into the mess it’s in.  One story calls it big capital; another, corporatism; an third, consumerism.  Uniformly they denounce the past few centuries as a mistake run amok, a blight to be rejected and corrected.  This rankles me just a bit, because the actual proposed societies can only exist because of the larger, expansionist, consumerist, big-science world.  Without the technologies spawned by the governments and the markets, there would be no Cascadia with its reputation-based economy or New Detroit with its skyscrapes reclaimed for vertical agriculture.

The philosophy of the book is unsatisfying, because the new societies are every bit as parasitic as the one they strive to replace.  These new worlds feast on the carcass of the previous one (ours) and seem deliberately oblivious to it.  In the end, that didn’t ruin the book because, in my mind, that is very human — exactly how a new vibrant society would have to view its predecessor.  We all need myths of a heroic age.

The preachiness varies a lot from story to story.  It is worst in the introductory piece, by Jay Lake (“In the Forests of the Night”) and seems to dribble off from there. That might be a structural artifact; the need to explain the new world and hook the reader drives some of the choices Mr. Lake makes.  Even allowing for that, I found it to be the least successful of the stories

The second story (“Stochasti-City” by Tobias Buckell), on the other hand, is probably my favorite.  On one level it’s a more straightforward action tale with a unified narrator.  (Mr. Lake attempts a fractured, multifaceted narrative along the lines of Stand on Zanzibar; but he lacks John Brunner’s dexterity.) The big idea seems much more achievable and realistic, as well as something real people might actually attempt.  Of course it’s just my opinion, but Buckell does a better job than Lake in selling his reality.

“The Red in the Sky is Our Blood” by Elizabeth Bear works pretty well, too.  Like the previous piece, it’s about an outsider gaining access to the hidden new cities that underlie the collection.  In this case, the narrative is perhaps a little too linear, though the characters are well-drawn.

John Scalzi’s contribution (in addition to being editor) is “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis”. It means “use everything but the squeal”, referring to a maxim about the high efficiency of pig.  And it is a pig story.  But don’t let that fool you, the way it does the narrator (at first).  It’s still a clever, if workmanlike, exploration of the role of labor in the new cities, which can’t base things on ever-increasing consumption.  I have a soft spot for the story, since it deals in no small measure with education and its impact.  But it must be admitted that it is probably the least adventurous or ambitious of the stories in the collection.

These middle three stories have the advantage of hanging together very well; they mesh to make the shared future world believable, whereas the bookend stories feel more shoe-horned in.  There’s an irony in the fact that Cascadia — the virtual, zero-footprint city that springs up in the Pacific Northwest — is more real and believable in the three stories that mention it obliquely, than in the one that describes it in detail.

The final tale is “To Hie from Far Cilenia” by Karl Schroeder.  Compared to the others, it’s right off the map.  (There’s a bit of a pun in that sentence but — I’ve decided to be spoiler-free.)  The earlier tales all split their focus between technology and sociology.  Not only do the authors explore what sort of devices we will need to survive the Century of Judgment; they also pick about what must change in our social interactions.  But Schroeder goes far deeper than that.  He ponders whether near real-time resource mapping will open up the unexpected vista of a whole new reality — or, at least, of a way of perceiving the world that is so radically different from what our monkey brains are used to, that it might just as well be a new reality.  I’m not sure he really succeeds at making this clear, but I’ll have to reread the story before I could say he failed.

Overall, the book is well worth the time spent in reading it and pondering its questions.  Although the prose is modern, its spirit harkens back to the early days of science fiction, where authors used grand visions to explore unseen possibilities.  Metatropolis is light years removed from the pulp fiction of the 1930s, but it aspires to some of the same larger purpose: to serve as a sort of handbook of the future, helping us navigate its unseen shoals by throwing a light on what might be.

I’ve received my new laptop and am working on getting it outfitted and up to speed.  (This process, by the way, is distressingly like moving to a new home and is equally as frustrating and potentially as traumatizing.)  After logging in for the first time, the system helpfully suggests that you create a system backup.  This is a wise and useful thing to do, so that you can restore to original conditions, and I was impressed that Microsoft offered it.

Except…

It takes fiendishly long to generate the system image — after about two hours of waiting, I gave up last night and went to bed.  During the night, the other “helpful” feature of Windows 7 kicked in, which was automatic downloading and installation of updates.  As anyone who works with Microsoft knows, you can’t even think about an update without Windows needing to reboot, which it did … automatically.  This interrupted the system backup, of course; and since the system has changed, the backup can’t even just pick up from where it left off.

Net result?  I must begin the backup again and wait another two hours for it to run.   I will have had my laptop for over a day without being able to run a single program on it.  What is the overwhelming temptation, of course?  To skip the backup “for now” and just dive in.  So these two choices for Microsoft have the combined effect of discouraging proper computer hygiene — and for many users, probably taint the whole idea of backups in general.

Way to go, Microsoft!

(By the way, I have of course also now turned off the automatic install option, as it’s insane to let anyone just drop stuff into your operating system without at least some chance at review.  Once again I am reminded of a mantra I’ve had since at least Windows 95:  Whatever default behavior Microsoft settles on, it’s the wrong one.  We could call their philosophy “default-to-fail”.)

Via Ezra Klein, a wll-argued piece by Timothy Lee on the recent flap over the forced resignation of Dave Weigel from The Washington Post.  If none of those names mean anything to you, then this is unlikely to be very interesting…  Lee’s thesis is that reportorial objectivity is more a function of the economies of scale of a major newspaper than any unquestionable principle of High Journalism.  And now that the economics of reporting have shifted, so too must our understanding of what is appropriate.

And yes, I didn’t link to the Post because I happen to think they’re wrong on this one and I’m just petty enough to deny them the infinitesimal traffic I might contribute.

This is an excellent TED talk about what intellectual property people can learn from the fashion industry. In essence, there is no IP protection in fashion (except for trademark), and yet its economic impact dwarfs highly-protected fields like music or film.
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This (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/) is an animated illustration of how Facebook has been increasingly defining your personal data as “open to everyone”.

The EFF has an excellent timeline of the changes in the privacy policy at Facebook.  It’s worth a read for anyone who might consider Facebook either (a) private in any sense or (b) ethically reliable in any sense.  These changes bother me less than other people because I’ve always assumed Facebook would screw us over on privacy, so I treat it like a big virtual billboard+skywriting.

This video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3jkUhG68wY&feature=player_embedded) is a hilarious take-down of the music publishing industry’s allegation that personal filesharing is “killing” music.  Part of the fun is figuring out the early 1980s references.  Also, I would totally buy a flag that had that cassette-and-crossbones logo…

Also, remember that according to former MPAA chief Jack Valenti,

[T]he VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

Not that the content cartels would ever condone the use of overblown and hyperbolic language to frighten lawmakers into writing into law special rights to protect their outmoded business models…

I was cruising TechDirt and saw a neat post on “Is The Federal Government The Most Interesting Tech Startup For 2009?“  The idea is that the recent data.gov initiative has led to an outpouring of with-it and effective apps allowing anyone to get a handle on the vast trove of information compiled by the federal government.  If you haven’t checked out data.gov, give it a whirl — it’s pretty astounding.  After a week of hearing about ludicrous claims of “death panels” and “keeping government’s hands off my (government-run) Medicare”, it was nice to be reminded that good people working hard can produce tremendous work — that government can serve a positive purpose and isn’t intrinsically evil, corrupt, or incompetence.

Some of the nifty apps I saw (via the techdirt link) were

• This We Know:  Info on communities and towns, all in one place.
• House Scorecard: Track the House process.
• data.gov time machine:  Visualization tool to see trends in a time series.
• Fly On Time: A tool to find the most on-time route between two cities.

This isn’t quite the level of Star Trek (“Computer, rearrange known data into a new theory of physics”) but it’s a step in the right direction.    And if the survival of democracy requires the active participation of an educated and engaged citizenry, then cataloging what is actually known can help secure the health of our republic.  For all the noise and thunder of the 24-hour news cycle, this is where the action really is.