Campus Manager Goes Loco

Durham uses something called Campus Manager to reduce network malware, and given the time I had with it this year I think we may have quite a few aggravated freshers over the next few days. Until a computer is registered, any attempt to view an external Web page will trigger a redirect to the Campus Manager registration pages, the process starting with links to University regulations (binding us not to use the network for anything illegal, etc.). Someone seems to have forgotten to whitelist these links, since trying to follow them brought me back to the start of the registration process.

Clicking on the button anyway to confirm that I, Joseph K, had read and agreed to adhere to these unseen regulations – well, they probably haven't changed much from former years – I downloaded the executable that scans machines and judges their fitness to enter the Kingdom of ITS. I lacked up-to-date Spybot S&D files. Okay: the process includes the provision of links to a repository so that one can get the necessary files. Except that the anti-spyware files weren't there; examination of the directory tree showed that even the expected folders were missing. Faced with a forest of 404s I resorted to downloading the files I needed in the computer room and transferring them with a thumb drive. Then, having passed the tests, I got stuck in some sort of mad loop in which the scanning program reckoned my computer had been registered, but I still couldn't avoid the redirects. A reboot sorted that out, somehow.

So, I want to think happy thoughts. Model railways make me feel nostalgic (which has its happy as well as its painful aspects, whatever the etymology might suggest) because when I was much younger my father used to take me along when visiting model railway exhibitions. I can't fit a train set into my luggage, but various people have made videos available.

On time/leaves on the line...

I'm not sure about the soundtrack, but this one has some judiciously chosen camera angles, and considering the date of uploading...

Look out for the spiral near the end:

I love the trackside fairground at around 20 seconds:

There's some lovely scenery in this one: the kind of advert I'm willing to watch and embed...

For the Gomez Adams in you, a change of tone. The humour's a bit loose, but the carnage is real:

Wanted: One Igor. Apply Within.

Tipped off by a BoingBoing post, I find myself giving rapt attention to alexcf's deviantART gallery. Steampunk influences + Lovecratian and otherwise macabre topics = a sensory treasure trove. I love the way in which each piece suggests a wider world while leaving ample space for the imagination to roam; the only drawback is that often I'd also love to see 'behind the scenes' footage, finding out how works were constructed and how they look in normal lighting conditions. Though maybe that would spoil the atmosphere.

...And They Were Scattered

I haven't had time to look for the text of Trevor Philips's conference speech, so I'm relying on the BBC's account of his comments on British history. With that caveat duly announced, let me take issue with the suggestion that... well, generally, that there is some sort of moral imprerative to generate an 'inclusive' historical narrative.

In this specific case, the role of the Turks in relation to the Armada is an interesting one in its own right—indeed, I want to know more: I want to hear commentary that respects the cultural and political complexity of the situation in order to investigate just how the involvement of the Turks came about, instead of an attempt to cast the Turks one-dimensionally as token Muslims in a bid to tell a morally edifying story. That doesn't actually tell anyone much about Muslims; no surprise, since it simplifies the situation in order to emphasise one aspect of who the Turks of the era were (albeit a central element of their culture). Apparently 'the reason for this [is] so we have an identity which brings us together'—which is not in itself an ignoble aim, and does not amount to actually seeking to falsify history. It's quite arguable that British history as presently recounted is no less artificial. Yet I'm disturbed, because I draw the following inferences:

• There is or should be one and only one dominant narrative of British history.
• The emphases of this one account should be deliberately determined by present-day social agenda.
• These agenda have a moral, rather than merely investigative, role.

There isn't a gold-standard historical narrative, because historians have disagreements (and limited sources), even meta-disagreements about what it is they're trying to do. (Which doesn't make me an opponent of historical realism. Apparently 'historical realism is a thoroughly discredited position... Nevertheless, there are still very many historians who adopt it and some philosophers of history have lambasted their unwillingness to face up to the failings of realism.' Naturally I find it appealing.) Inevitably historians' parochial concerns will influence how they investigate the past, but this is a limitation, not an imperative. A partial solution, very much in the classical liberal tradition, is to have many people doing historical investigation, sometimes supplementing and sometimes disagreeing with each other's work. It's perfectly reasonable to suggest, and seek to demonstrate, that a full understanding of the Armada's defeat must give some credit to the Turks; a moral imperative is superfluous.

I'm worried, firstly, that attempting to demand some 'inclusive' historical account will in directing historical pedagogy from the top downwards actually exclude or marginalise any angle which doesn't scratch perceived moral itches; secondly, that getting fired up with righteous zeal may not be helpful in doing historical work which minimises distortion. (What would it seriously prove that 'some Muslims' had a role in the failure of the Armada? That Muslims can do geopolitics too?) The past is messy, and historical work can be messy too. That's not necessarily a bad thing, provided that everyone's free to join in.

Still... Congratulations to Mr Philips for providing a political topic that gets my attention during conference season. Not so long ago I followed the major parties' conferences avidly; now I skim over the news reports, trying to avoid lectures on climate change from non-climatologists. Even I, a moral philosopher, wonder sometimes whether there can be a surfeit of morality.

Nuggets and Puddings

I need to do some actual thinking about this project, so here's an outline. The broad intention is to construct a framework theory of 'cultural heritage' which could be deployed in considering moral problems in the area. I don't really know what a 'framework theory' is supposed to look like – as I'm fond of reflecting, there is no formal specification for a moral theory – but I expect to be grappling with what, in a morally significant sense, cultural heritage is, and what that entails. Following on from some earlier work drawing on and critiquing James Boyle's suggestion that rhetoric to defend the public domain should draw on the methods of the environmental movement, in which I investigated the plausibility of adopting the ideas of environmental ethics with respect to philosophy of intellectual property and heritage ethics generally, I'll be drawing on philosophical work on environmental holism. The standard question goes something like, how can 'the environment' be a repository of moral value? One can ask a similar question about cultural heritage. In both cases you're dealing with a hugely complex 'thing' which incorporates many interdependent things, and in both cases looking at the thing as a whole clearly presents difficulties but perhaps also aids understanding of something significant.

Tell me more/change the subject...

One marker's comments on that earlier essay inform me without argument that I've failed to delineate cultural heritage, since a technical paper published in an obscure journal and read by only two or three people clearly isn't part of our cultural heritage. That exemplifies what I think of as the 'gold nugget' model of heritage: there are certain works – a canon, if you like – which by whatever means qualify as 'heritage', and then there's other stuff which is firmly non-heritage. Except in its most unrefined manifestations such a model will allow for a sliding scale rather than demanding pure nuggets, but the scale has 'heritage' at one end and 'non-heritage' at the other.

Then you have what I think of as the 'plum pudding' model (not to be confused with the 'plum pudding' model of the atom): there are certain, discrete, works of especial importance (the canon, if you please), and then there are all the other works which also qualify as heritage, and while pretty well all human workmanship qualifies as part of the heritage pudding, and to make the pudding you need both the plums and the pudding mixture, the plums are still pretty distinct from the rest.

I haven't settled on a name for the final category – pick-and-mix? – but it's the model in which pretty well all human workmanship qualifies as heritage and there's no discrete division within the category: there is room (arguably) for heritage objects of greater and lesser importance, but there isn't a top tier which qualifies as a discrete category. (For example, the class of heritage objects with n importance points will at most contingently, though perhaps not altogether coincidentally, have as its sub-class the class of spectacularly beautiful writings.)

There are ample complicating factors, notably a sturdy debate about what 'culture' is, but today I'm glossing over a lot of that. I'm a defender of the as-yet-nameless category, and I think drawing on environmental holism could help to shed some light. First I need to talk about what kind of 'lives' heritage objects have. The word 'heritage' conjures up images of artifacts, say, or works of Great Literature which have survived long enough to be recognised as significant (on intrinsic or extrinsic grounds) and which thereby perhaps qualify for some special protection. Then, on the other hand (or is it...?), you have the acts of creation, enjoyment, learning, etc.—collectively, the generation, use and regeneration of cultural objects, all their myriad interactions and interdependencies. So we have cultural objects and cultural activity, and the idea of the former makes no sense without the latter. Much of the point of wanting to protect the public domain, for example, is that when a work enters the public domain its potential for new uses and interactions increases as the restrictions of intellectual property are removed. (Some of Lawrence Lessig's comments on what U.S. law calls 'fair use' are similarly motivated; and indeed, the whole point of fair use is to ensure that criticism, parody, etc. are not rendered impossible by copyright. Partly it's a question of free speech, but political freedom isn't the only thing that makes fair use desirable.)

I want to play up cultural activity in relation to heritage; indeed, I want to link it to ethical work on (transgenerational) community. I can bring in some exciting stuff, like the open access movement. In particular I want to bring in property and intellectual property (and DRM): both Boyle and Peter Drahos (author of A Philosophy of Intellectual Property) use the image of an intellectual commons, which is part of what inspired my community emphasis. However, I want to avoid a scenario in which it looks as though we're just discussing the fate of a group of old objects and the debate turns into 'just' property theory or something. That's too detached from human life: the grandly named Holmes Rolston III wrote somewhere that while an ecosysytem can have intrinsic moral worth, a stamp collection can't, because nothing in it is alive, and yes, I can see what he's getting at, but I'm not sure it's helpful to distinguish the stamp collection from its own environment here. On the intrinsic/extrinsic value question I'll need to write at greater length later, however.

I'm still unsure precisely how to treat it, but my mind keeps returning to a remark by Horace, on his literary legacy: 'I have raised a monument more durable than bronze.'

In the end, though, all this has to be of some use to people allocating museum budgets, making intellectual property policy, etc. If it's all equally heritage, what criteria can be used to set priorities under ethical constraint? Well, a framework theory doesn't have to be directly applicable, i.e. it doesn't (handily) have to provide the normative answers, but it should help people get to them. I'll need to formulate my aims more clearly and precisely, but first I think I should do some more groundwork to set the scene...

Enhasa

I'm not presently as happy as an man ought to be whose recent holiday read was the new Discworld novel, and that's because with only a short time until the start of term, it still isn't decided and announced whether I passed the M.A. or not; on top of that I've been mysteriously unsuccessful in getting a response from College about rent payment, which I hope I'll be allowed to do by cheque given the debacle standing order payment turned into a couple of years ago (when the Halifax, doing quarterly but not thrice-yearly payments, gave College a rather large sum of my money when they weren't supposed to). Frankly, I'm lethargic: certainly the thought that things could be worse is present before my mind, but so is the usual frustration when I can't do anything and don't know enough. So I can't say what will happen in the next academic year. Well, of course there are always surprises...

• Perhaps the much-rumoured snap General Election will produce a delicately hung parliament that ends up repealing Spanner and restricting copyright for dead authors.
• Perhaps the Storm botnet will manifest as a Great Old One, and Charles Stross will become either its High Priest or a valiant crusader against the eldritch.
• Perhaps the third Black Mages album will be released. (This may actually happen, but I've stopped holding the proverbial breath.)

...but right now there's an irritable torpitude. I've beautiful and fascinating distractions, and a couple of interesting writing projects I'm working on in my spare time, but I'm supposed to be preparing for a course I may not be able to take. So in the interests of some sort of intellectual discipline, here's an incomplete 'to do' list; although some of the items have been on my list for rather a long time. [Update: since this wasn't at all clear... this is my general list, not a course-related one. Stuff to keep my mind active.]

• Read up on Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity. The attempt to found a Positivist church of, in effect, scientism (modelled to a large extent on Roman Catholicism, at least in terms of organisational structure) has both comical elements – like the clothes done up at the back, so that donning them required assistance; this was supposed to encourage human solidarity, but the story goes that it helped get the Positivists raided by police on suspicion of homosexuality – and alarming ones (in what it portends for science and religions alike). There is a dedicated textbook on this, but it's the ridiculously expensive kind of academic book and the University Library doesn't have a copy. They do have some related material, though.
• Read quite a lot of fiction: Babbitt for a start. It's been on my list ever since I read an excerpt in an A-Level textbook, and I know the Library has a copy.
• Get better at actually finishing RPGs. Given that I recently ordered a copy of Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria, I may not have much luck with this one.
• Refresh my memory of scriptural hermeneutic methods. This is one of the areas about which I now recall less than I used to (which was the four-meanings-per-verse school again?), and of those there are too many.
• From that same category: languages, natural (sometimes dead) and model. I never leave enough time to wade into these properly anyway, but even so I forget too much (though in the case of Tolkien's languages there's admittedly a lot of educated conjecture involved anyway).
• Read the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (in translation, of course). It's been glowering at me for ages, looking impressively thick and scholarly, and so I keep prioritising things that look easier to finish. I'm not even sure whether I'll enjoy it (though there must be intellectual poser value to be had), but I ought to find out.
• I really need to look into some elementary aspects of legal theory; if nothing else it'll help with my work.
• Historiography, too. One of my intellectual watershed moments was reading an offhand description of rhetorical historiography in some writing on Hobbes: in the curriculum of the liberal arts, history was considered a branch of rhetoric, and rhetoric wasn't so much the art of persusation generally as a means of exhorting people to live good, Christian lives, where history was supposed to provide morally edifying examples. Before that I'd never really considered the possibility that the meaning of 'history' is itself historically contingent.

In me the Listmaster, but I suspect this will include backburner remainders for a while yet...

Dark City Mausoleum

The good news: I've obtained a copy of Parasite Eve and entered the debug room, as described in the FAQ file at the GSHI. The less splendiferous news: it's, well, pretty drab. I don't mean merely that it's devoid of the weird jokes and unused content found in the finest debug rooms: just look at it.

Not very cheerful, is it? I don't think I'm going to make a video of this one. It's perfectly functional: you can warp to various scenes, get useful items and turn off random battles. Probably the most interesting aspect is that among the available weapons is the ludicrously powerful DebugSMG. It doesn't alter the fact that you're talking to crates, though.

Don't Link to This Post

One thing I didn't mention in yesterday's post: signing up for Websites brings one into contact with the joys of legalistic back-covering. I started a collection of cruel and unusual Terms of Service back when I was comparing image hosts, and my collection is now enlarged.

From Imageshack's simplified summary we have this:

Don't upload anything that can be even remotely construed as porn, copyrighted material, harassment, or spam.

If the full-length terms actually said this, it would be forbidden to upload anything which wasn't obviously old enough to have fallen out of copyright, since one automatically gains copyright on one's own creations. This kind of sloppiness is offputting, to say the least, and is principally why I opted for Photobucket instead. The part of the Photobuket terms that bothers me is the one forbidding users to

Post, upload, email or otherwise transmit any Content that includes code that is hidden or otherwise surreptitiously contained within the images, audio or video of any Content that is unrelated to the immediate, aesthetic nature of the Content...

The problem is that I don't know what this means, beyond suspecting that by 'code' they mean executable computer code inside files (like the WMV vulnerability from a while back). I could hazard a guess, but in the world of legalese 'hazard' is often the operative word.

The Shelfari Terms of Service are unusually thoroughgoing in discouraging impropriety: content must not be

obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, suggestive...

Most of the others I've seen elsewhere, but 'suggestive'? I can think of quite a lot of books discussion of which would appear to be quite severely hampered. What principally makes me single out Shelfari for scrutiny here, however, is this:

You are granted a limited, non-exclusive right to create a text hyperlink to the Site for noncommercial purposes, provided such link does not portray Company or any of its products and services in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise defamatory manner and provided further that the linking site does not contain any adult or illegal material or any material that is offensive, harassing or otherwise objectionable. This limited right may be revoked at any time.

I was under the impression I already had that right. Creating a hyperlink amounts to nothing more than associating a text string or image with a certain URI: it's a perfectly mundane speech act, and basically an instance of giving directions. Now if Shelfari decide that my linking to them constitutes grounds for termination of my account, then, well, that's their right (which isn't to say that it would be right). But that amounts not to granting a right but to placing restrictions on one.

I've seen someone complain before when a site criticising her writings linked to her site in the process, even though that act made it easier for people to find her writings and reach an informed judgment. It strikes me as a very perplexing attitude: the context may be an unpleasant one, but in that case the hyperlink seems unlikely itself to be the problem. The Web and its search engines rather depend on people's not needing permission from the owner(s) of somerandomurl.net to create links to http://somerandomurl.net. (That one used actually to exist.)

Anyway. I haven't had time to make a sport of Terms-scanning, but perhaps someday I shall be able to compile a collection of egregious examples. Or move on to EULAs. With due hat-tipping to Weird Al Yankovic: 'Alas, the Web at large ignores/ My fearsome legalese, / So all I ask is everybody please...'

Bookmarks

I've recently added more links to the 'Stalk Me' 'Other Spheres' section of the right-hand column. One (quite well established by now) links to my del.icio.us bookmarks. Besides finding the service convenient given my mass-bookmarking tendencies, which have resulted in a set of unwieldly browser menus – I wonder whether Places would have helped with that, had it not been removed from Firefox 2 – I like the idea that someone who wants to know, say, what online sources I'm using in cultural heritage research can view an up-to-date collection of tagged links. It suits research as a collaborative enterprise performed by a community of scholars, etc.

The other links to my LibraryThing collection; I also made a Shelfari account, but after some pondering I decided LibraryThing looked like the best bet. If I decide I want a large online list of the books I own and don't care to pay the (fairly reasonable) sum LibraryThing charges for a paid account with space for 200+ books on the list, then, well, Shelfari can import LibraryThing collections. In a test import of 33 books, though, only 28 were recognised, so it looks as though LibraryThing has access to better data. [Update: aNobii seemed better in this respect, though the import seemed to take a long time; that partly coincided with some downtime, though, which complicates matters.] We'll see how things turn out.

Moral Significance for the Fine Structure Constant...?

I'm not minded to start posting notes on heritage theory yet, but I do want to add a quick sketch of a problem I've worked on before. Basically it's a problem concerning moral relevance—especially but not exclusively awkward for moral naturalism, I suspect.

I'm largely going to ignore the complexities of reduction here: basically I take it as a starting assumption that employment in a thoroughgoing scientific explanation or description entails a relevance relation, e.g. if I kick you painfully it's relevant to a naturalistic account of the event that the nervous system works in a certain way, etc. My basic problem is this: suppose I take out a gun and shoot you. Intuitively, that you are injured, in pain and perhaps dead is morally relevant, whereas the fluid dynamics of post-collapse arterial spurting aren't. Which looks odd, because high-level metabolic phenomena like dying depend on and can't be divorced from the way in which the natural world is basically set up (to put it loosely). If I kick you painfully, the act of kicking gets flagged up as morally relevant by virtue of a causal relation, while the details of nervous system operations in the causal chain get glossed over as morally irrelevant, even though they're rather crucial parts of that chain.

By and large, we don't intuitively attribute moral relevance to natural phenomena even if they have critical explanatory relevance to those phenomena we do take to be morally relevant. On a related note, education in the sciences generally isn't taken to count as moral education, i.e. it isn't assumed that enlarging people's knowledge of anatomy, say, makes them more moral or gives them more 'moral knowledge' (though if a given natural property just is morally relevant, why not?). But how can we say that an instance of being in pain is morally relevant, but the operations of the nervous system which make that pain possible aren't? (I don't think citing Dancy here is going to prove a satisfactory explanation.)

I think it's a fairly safe assumption that if ν = ω (where both are natural properties; in practive ω would tend not to be a single property, but anyway...), then any relevance relation with some ρ which holds for ν holds also for ω. So one possible line of attack would be to question at every step whether (ν reduces to ω) lets us infer that (ν = ω): mind-brain identity (eliminative materialism, etc.) would be an obvious point of interest here. Alternatively, look for – presumably non-natural – properties possessed by ν but not ω or vice versa: not a nice option for moral naturalism, of course.

I've come to doubt, though, that employing a more refined metaphysics of reduction or something is really a solution to a puzzle arising from moral psychology; maybe moral phenomenology would be the best starting point...

Concealed Imperatives

I'm mystified. I use metric weights and measures quite a lot, though I'd resent being told I had to, whatever my own judgment on the matter. However, contrary to the opinions of altogether too many commentators on Mark Mardell's weblog, it doesn't make me Big or Clever. It doesn't signify that I've caught up with the 21st Century. It doesn't denote a globalist outlook. They're measuring conventions!

Of course, the problem is that what should have been a pragmatic matter got turned into one of international politics, because both the European Union and Her Majesty's Government aren't technical standards bodies but political bodies with political agenda. It's not unprecedented: U.S. spelling is partly a matter of different development, partly a product of a willingness to overstep the bounds of lexicography and mark political differences with those of spelling conventions. (Well, not a universal willingness: while nobody on either side of the Atlantic is likely to defend musick, neither is anyone likely to support medicin.) Politics interferes all over the place, and where politics goes, rotten argumentation often follows.

Why should there be such an appetite for 'arguments' which are not just mundanely bad but resemble some sort of attempt to insult the writer's own intelligence? Here we have specimens of the currently popular argumentum Gregorianum, the bizarre idea that a reference to a certain hundred-year period on a currently popular calendar counts as an argument against anything developed before it. This of course is a form of the more general superstition that newer things are automatically better than older ones, with a strange concept of the metaphysics of time in which one can be stuck in the past or dragged kicking and screaming into the present day. For added weirdness, combine this appeal to Progress with the standard fallacy of appeal to majority thinking, then avoid noticing the incongruity. (At least in this case there aren't any examples of another of my pet annoyances, the argumentum ad omnes decentes homines.)

It's a psychological mystery: why would anybody do this? It would be understandable if there were wit to compensate, but these are mere clichés. (They probably need repetition to survive.) Actually, I think it's perhaps an indication of how far psychology and psychoanalysis have penetrated into everyday thinking: political commentary becomes the task of uncovering the 'true' motive which will undermine the supposedly rational superstructure. Which if you happen to write with the insight of a Nietzsche might work; I agree that Robert Solomon may have been on to something when he suggested that there was a place for certain kinds of ad hominem argment. But pointing the finger and shouting 'Little Englander!' doesn't cut it. It isn't a revelatory insight, it's the imprecise application of a label.

Okay, so what exactly is it that gives merit to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, or perhaps (more recently) John Gray's project of casting 'secular humanism' as a grotesque reinvention of Christianity rather than its repudiation, but gives no merit to some blustering commentator with his smirking clichés about 'middle England' and 'climate change deniers'? (I'm not sure I agree with Gray – in some areas I have defnite doubts – but he's clearly a more serious thinker than a lot of pundits, amateur and professional.) Both of those examples seem to me to expose contingency: it looks so terribly plausible that morality could have its origin in resentment (and look, we can even play with etymological examples!); there are such suspicious similarities between Christianity and secular humanism when certain aspects are highlighted. So one comes to suspect that maybe it wasn't simply the light of reason that caused things to turn out just as they did. (I probably ought to bring in Foucault here – certainly his approach to historiography wasn't one of finding out how things really happened – but I don't want this to turn into textual exigesis.)

That doesn't feel like a complete answer, though... Contingency isn't in itself a rebuttal, and anyway, what distinguishes doing this style of argument well from doing it badly? Maybe a topic for another day...

Erasing a Mound More Dubious When Bought

"It's done one frame at a time, outsourced to overseas labs that employ as many as 100 technicians," [Ganari] Takahashi tells Asahi Geino. "A skilled technician might devote 8 hours to a single minute's worth of mosaic..."
Japan Times, 9/9/2007

He's talking about the genital-obscuring mosaics required by Japanese obscenity law—and what do I think of but redubbed anime? (Once I've finished wondering how the skilled technicians feel about their work, and whether their parents know, and whether much existential anguish is involved.) There are two principal similarities:

• They add to the associated costs (which get passed to the customer)
• They involve substantial alteration of critical elements of the work, which many customers don't want

I doubt any of Soft On Demand's customers are the ones who want mosaics, but in logic 'some' (∃) amounts to 'there exists at least one'. There are people who favour dubbed anime, and laws against putting them out of their misery; supposedly sub-only releases are still regarded as commercially dubious prospects in the U.K. market. Still, one of the annoyances of this blessed age in which we actually get combined sub/dub DVD releases is that every legal purchaser pays for the prosthetic soundtrack. So we end up with situations in which people pay for things which (a) they don't want and (b) aren't part of the 'original' works (although 'original' does have different meanings in each case).

Of course, one case arises from some peculiarly interpreted laws, the other from a nasty set of economic conditions. What I think is the root similarity is a disregard for the integrity of the work which arises through commoditisation. It's well established in Anglo-American legal traditions that Art and Obscenity are mutually exclusive categories (or at least, that artistic merit is an accepted defence); my knowledge of Japanese law is poor, but I think it's broadly fair to say that if you have a blanket requirement that bits of image be turned into mush you're not worrying much about the aesthetic integrity of the works.

As for redubs, I'm not relying on any theory of aesthetics which rules out remixes, reworkings, etc. Two different productions of the same play can both have artisitic merit—fine. Two soundtracks to the same animated production can both have artisitic merit—fine. However, a factory process of replacing soundtracks in order to satisfy the commercial imperatives created by people who can't cope with subtitles is a commodity reworking, not a reimagining. (Even if the people doing it care greatly about avoiding egregious diversions from the original.) It treats the work as a product which can be disassembled and reconfigured in response to profit motives.

If I go further in this direction I'll have to do obligatory things like referencing Warhol and Walter Benjamin, and I don't feel like doing that today. What I do want to draw out is that once the most aesthetically elevated of works become economic objects, it's questionable whether there's any essential distinction between them and pornographic works. (Hence the 'media effects' tradition.) Of course, I'd argue that position anyway, but then I agree with – if I recall correctly – the Williams Committee in finding it an odd idea that the public may be corrupted, so long as they are corrupted by art.

[Update: why didn't it occur to me yesterday to add DRM to the mix? Probably because DRM isn't built into what you see; it's more of a wrapper to control what can be done with it. Customers still pay for reduced functionality, though.]

Perhaps If I Could Read Russian All Would be Explained...

Today's artist gets something of an NSFW warning: Max Sauco (as I'm led to believe he's named) has created some comparatively mild works (by which I mean, with less epidermis than he often likes), but much of his output is, well, aptly named 'Strange Eros'. But it's clearly Art, so that's all right.

‘So if you're a Level 7 Socialite, shouldn't you have +3 defence against my not making eye contact?’

For no obvious reason I'm wondering about the pervasive belief in 'social skills' again: as though 'being sociable' weren't a fundamentally co-operative activity, presupposing a meeting of minds and a readiness to collaborate in order for any possibility of goals, success, or failure. It doesn't fall apart because of a lack of 'skill'; its falling apart removes any question of skill. (Maybe there are recognisable goal-oriented skills like 'being a good host(ess)'—but that's as much 'social function' as 'social engagement'.) In my happier moods I think this is a mistake arising from over-enthusiasm in postulating a detached ego; in my bleaker ones I suspect a submerged reinforcement of social convention, pretending the goals possibilities of being together are already decided. If these were really understood as 'skills', wouldn't acting conventionally with other conventional people be a very weak proof of possession, being so commonly achieved?

Myths arise easily: I keep thinking of the 'e-mail is informal' rule of thumb. As an empirical statement, '∀x if x is e-mail, x is informal' is clearly false nowadays: some 'official' e-mails are very formal indeed, complete with multi-paragraph non-disclosure footers. But more to the point, e-mail is not essentially informal: SMTP doesn't care what you write so long as it's in 7-bit ASCII. There isn't really much of a convention here, and people can use e-mail however they (plural) like. Yet I've been told before that my preferred style is 'too formal' for e-mail, for a Web forum, etc.—all of which seems to boil down to meaning, oh dear, some actual interpretative effort is called for. Why the concealment behind the format, the hyper-McLuhan-ism?

Put them together, and— Well, you have praise of skills people desire not to require. The skills to deal with eccentrics are supposed to be unnecessary, apparently. Except that 'social skills' aren't conceived of as the ability to deal with new situations, as far as I can tell, but as the readiness to approach any situation in some approved manner. (I'm going for a 'folk' interpretation here, to spare myself some research... hence the 'idle musing' Attribute.) But either way, people don't want 'success', they want companionship. I hope.

Adopting a Mildly Happy Pose

A couple of days ago the IPKat published the results for its 'What should be done about orphan works?' poll. At 182 votes it doesn't mean much, but my preferred category was the largest by one vote, so 'jolly good'.

On an 'incentives' model, it's sufficient for copyright to give creatives the opportunity to gain financial returns from whomever they can persuade to pay; it isn't necessary that those opportunities should be taken. That these 'state fund' ideas are being held up and receiving even a handful of votes bothers me: it smacks of propertisation as a perceived norm rather than as a pragmatic device. I can see no need for such measures in order to provide incentives to create – of course, I think copyrights should be granted on registration rather than on creation of the works, already putting my opinions out of step with the state of existing laws – and I can see a value in having more works available at no cost for potential derivative use. Orphaned works place a superfluous burden on those who wish to use them when those holding their copyright retain monopoly privileges and the potential to profit from them, but can't even be found by those seeking to make legal use of the works.

Now You See Them...

One thing about FFVII has puzzled me for years. In the PC version's box was a self-promotional Eidos booklet advertising the games they were publishing at the time, and on the FFVII PC page was a screenshot clearly showing Red XIII, alone, on the raised area to the right of the main Kalm map. Never having come across a way of triggering such a scene, I was left to wonder what I'd missed. However, a little playing with Hiroyuki Matsuhara's debug room has yielded results: Red XIII is playable on the field screen as the party leader in Kalm.

The South debug room seems always to let you pick whatever party leader you like (although many of the warp options there force Cloud into the party anyway), but the East and South East rooms won't necessarily do this: here I was lucky. I haven't probed much into what affects this, but I think it probably depends on entering the debug rooms at the start of a new game.

This party manipulation makes the game very glitchy: an invisible party is a common outcome, and can arise unpredictably from certain character/map combinations (e.g. Barret as leader in Kalm). Sometimes area transitions break or cutscenes won't trigger—sometimes. I've also had a couple of fairly colourful crashes in the Wall Market shops. I managed to control Aeris in her red dress; I thought I might be able to control the blue-clad Tifa by the same method, but when I tried the result was a normal Tifa, inactive, beside a controllable transvestite Cloud. I didn't include her in the video since she's hard to see, but here she is:

This messed up gondola probably suffers as much from my forcing a party of three in there as from the choice of members:

Normally the world map is pretty robust, using Cloud's model if it can't find anyone suitable in the party. However, on visiting the skewered Zolom with Red XIII as leader, then walking onto the world map, I ended up in the top left-hand corner, and in a familiar predicament.

The Hundredth Day Before Beethoven's Birthday

For some reason Snoopy Concert was never released outside Japan; a translation patch was made by Aeon Genesis. Besides some images of the box, cart and manual I haven't seen much material related to it on the Anglophone Web; I recorded a short cutscene from the opening of Schroeder's section because I found it amusing, and it shows how well the game's best moments capture the flavour of Schulz's material.

One mildly interesting detail is that this game keeps switching interlaced mode on and off; the screenshot above is actually 'hi-res' (and can be stretched by an emulator to keep the dimensions correct), but the video scene isn't. Some other games, e.g. Seiken Densetsu 3, also switch modes sometimes, but this one flips an awful lot.

I don't usually bother with these, but this one fits quite neatly:

Which Peanuts Character Are You?
	You are Schroeder. You are brilliant, ambitious, and brooding; you tackle tasks with extreme focus. People don't always interest you as much as other pursuits, though, so you can come off as aloof.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

Elementary Composition

At least in my subject, we teach students to go sub-zero on the tension scale: to give the game away right from the start. A detective novel written by a good philosophy student would begin: 'In this novel I shall show that the butler did it.' The rest will be just filling in the details.
Jonathan Wolff, 'Literary Boredom'

I think Prof. Wolff overstates his case a little here: given a good opportunity, a philosophy student could induce a sense of anticipation with something like the following:

In this novel I shall show that the butler did it. Although this theory has been largely neglected in the literature, the last butler ever employed by the victim having been dead for seventeen years at the time of the murder, and Colonel Mustard having apparently been seen committing the act by forty witnesses and three CCTV cameras, making a full confession and later repeating it in memoirs written in prison, I shall show that the 'Mustard did it' theory (Lestrade 1974) overlooks several critical details. I additionally reject the rival 'Plum did it' theory (Marple 1980), noting that although the Professor had been attempting to murder Sir Charles for five years following a boundary dispute, and was the sole inventor and owner of the prototype 'Excruciating Death Ray' shown by a post-mortem examination to have been the murder weapon, nevertheless there are strong reasons for denying his complicity. Finally I shall discuss both old and recently unearthed evidence showing conclusively that the butler did it.

Overall, though, Wolff has a point. I particularly dislike papers seeming to have been inspired by Lawrence Sterne: the kind that follow the abstract with an introduction which repeats the contents of the abstract at greater length and tell you what appears in each section, itself followed by Section One, which opens with a section introduction adding another layer of detail to laying out what's coming up in Section One. This surfeit of signposting probably does occur in pursuit of ideals of 'clarity'—highly sought after on Philosophy mark schemes, since nobody agrees on what philosophy is or should look like, but most of us agree that feeling confused is a bad thing. Except those who dissent. Nietzsche, as we know, was too flamboyant a stylist for his own good when it comes to interpretation. On the other hand, clarity and interest needn't be mutually exclusive: Mill and Russell spring to mind here. So can we explain the mounds of turgid prose just by concluding that academia is full of writers inferior to them?

Deadlines don't help; neither do word limits. Both make structure the master rather than the servant: my position as a student is of setting out to write approximately n words and then looking for stuff to fill this space. The thought is often in my mind that Socrates didn't do that. However, I don't think I can blame my stylistic failings on these limitations. Another difficulty is the diminished sense of writing 'for' someone: the objective comes to be structural ('given A, prove B') more than psychological ('offer a path to understanding'). Since, as Wolff notes, everything gets spelt out on the page, the expectation is that readers have been given all the required tools. Whether they care is beside the point—in theory at least. For professional academics there's also the matter of how one does in fact hold a job down: the motto is 'publish or die', not 'write interestingly'.

Note to self: keep pestering Amanda about the Campaign for Interesting Literature.

Final Fantasy VII International: Debug and 'Materia' Text - GlitterBerri's Translation

We now have a translation of the Final Fantasy VII International debug room screens shown in a previous post, courtesy of GlitterBerri. Also included for easy reference is her translation of the 'Materia' outtake. With these comes the following message: 'Yes, they're all as weird and random as they sound. No fault of mine! =)' [Update, 9/9/07: a few additions and some general tidying up, thanks in part to Forseti's input.]

Show/hide the translations...

The rest of this post consists of translations of Square's text by GlitterBerri, with help from Forseti. GlitterBerri's comments are ((in italics and, usually, double brackets)); I've added a few [in bold, in square brackets]. Since most of this text isn't mine, this post is excepted from the usual CC licence (bottom of page).

Yoshinori Kitase (1):

[1] Opening (skip movie with square button)
Feel the wind
Sector 1 gate open
T intersection (press square button when escaping)
First Mako reactor B5 (press square button for ((in?)) south Mako reactor B5)
Junon (square button for Yuffie, R1 for ((at?)) outer wall)
( )

[2] -Cancel
-Aeris
-Tifa
-Barret
-Red XIII
-Cid
- ((What's this one? It's blank?)) [That's the option for adding Cait Sith; it isn't blank in the English version...]
-Yuffie
-Sephiroth
-Beginning Soldier Lock ((Rock?)) [This is the 'Cloud lock' option; I entered the debug rooms at the start of a new game, so Cloud's still called 'Ex-SOLDIER'.]
-Change Party

Nazushige Nojima (2):

[1] :Global Reset:
-yes
-no
-the memory is over ['Ended reflecting on the past' in Square's translation]

[2] :Recruiting Members! RET • NONE
Cloud
Barret
Tifa
Aeris
Red XIII
Yuffie
Cait Sith
Vincent
Cid
Only Cloud 16 ((His age, I'm guessing...))
Only Cloud
Tifa Leads ((the party))
Cid Leads

[3] ba ba bi bi bu bu be be bo bo ga ga gi gi gu gu
ge ge go go za za ji ji zu zu ze ze zo zo da da
dzi dzi dzu dzu de de do do vu pa pa bi bi bu bu pe
pe po po 0 1 2 45 6 7 8 9 , .
ha ha hi hi fu fu he he ho ho ka ka ki ki ku ku
ke ke ko ko sa sa shi shi su su se se so so ta ta
chi chi tsu tsu te te to to u u a a i i e e
o o na na ni ni nu nu ne ne no no ma ma mi mi

((All characters in katakana and hiragana)) [As noted in the previous post, this is a sample shot of Zangan listing the game's text characters; later text boxes have the kanji.]

Motomu Toriyama (3):

[1] 「Oh! Let's fly to Sector 7!」
-welcome home
-before the memory (debug)
-materia intro (debug)
-good morning (debug)
-before the pillar battle
-cancel
-after the memory (debug)

[2] FINAL FANTASY 7
Easy type! ((Eh??)) [Maybe a reference to alterations for the Weatern release? I think the encounter rate was reduced. Cf. FFIV Easytype.]

[3] Aeris
「Currently still working.
Leave me alone」

Hiroyuki Matsuhara (4): N/A.

Hiroki Chiba (5):

[1] Home
Someday I'll go home to my town ♥

[2] -1F Meet my mother
-1F Mother tells a story - shocking fact!!
-2F So, should we escape~
-2F Barret cries, cries, cries
-I cancel

[3] Party Establishment
You're disqualified!
I want to be told clearly.

[4] Yes, I'm the person who checks the movies
Everyone, listen up!!
Let's close the check!!

[5] This is Sector 8
I love you, I love you, I love you
Anyone can say it easily

[6] "Rasudan" again...
For example, let's compare two people with lots of talent.
The other side is kind of alone.
Which would you choose?

['Rasudan' = 'LASDAN', which is how the final maps are named; perhaps means 'last dungeon'.]

[7] Meddling with Chocobo relationship parameters,
you should be able to do anything.
With the things that are there,
let's use spells and our heads.

[8] This is Sector Six.
Don't eat anything and look lively.

[9] -Corel Prison
-Hello, nice to meet you
-Now I've come to like you

[10] I'm the ranch
I love human unhappiness - I love human unhappiness
I love human unhappiness - I love human unhappiness

[11] Gold Saucer
The cat's stomach has lots of roses

[12] Yaa, I'm Dorubakki ((a name, apparently))
Where in the Gold Saucer
do you want to go~

[13] Are you going to meddle with various parameters?
Your eyes are too cold so
Your heart may be hot, your laughing profile
Love me do love me do love me do

Jun Akiyama (6):

[1] Barret
「This is part 2 of the Sector 5 slum!! What will you do?」
-Slum centre
-Pipe event

[2] Cid 「This is part 1 of Corneo's house!」
-Pimp event
-Welcome event

[3] -Pimp event
-Welcome event
-Reunion with Tifa event
-I don't feel like watching an event

[4] 「Is that so...... if that's the way it is, it's impossible to continue.
If you work every day, you'll feel that way too ((I think.. uh..)).
We'll keep each other company......」

Kazuhiko Kichioka (7):

[1] -Allowance please
-Lend me lots of money, pleeease!
-Lots of Materia
-Kataoka-kun, I wanna battle!
-Clear ((could be "money problems")) problems in past
-Prevent an accident
-Prepare for an accident
-I'll stuff your stomach with shaved bonito and feed you to a cat

[2] -Wall Market top (MRKT1)
-Wall Market bottom (MRKT2)
-Market after the bend (MRKT2)
-Quite full of fur cat's full of ashes ((no real meaning!))

[3] (Dive/Fly) from the wire climbing entrance?
By the way, it'll be after the fall of the Sector 7 plate. ((I think))
-to WCRIMB1 (with battery)
-to WCRIMB1 (no battery)
-to WCRIMB2
-WCRIMB1 rope jump test
-I'm done

Note: WCRIMB = wire climb in Engrish [It's a map name reference.]

[4] -First time
-Second time
-Third time
-Fourth time
-Fifth time
-Sixth time
-Last
-Do you really have brains?

[5] -Men's house
-Female costume
-Fill with concrete and sink in the south port

Hidemi Kyounen (8):

[1] Cid 「Ah, it hurts! ((maybe a pun here)) N-no, icicle lodge」

In romaji it says

"akurushii
i, iya aishikuru rojji"

...but "a, kurushii" means like "ah, painful"... so Cid may just be dyslexic, or he's joking. Who knows?

Masato Kato:

[1] -The fast way
-The way of the heart

[2] Hello, apprentice-hero-san.
Are you ready to travel?

[3] So, where will you go, I wonder?
-To Mideel
-To Mideel clinic!
-To Mideel consult event
-To Mideel raid event
-To the Lifestream!!
-To the mindzone!!
-To the spirit world!!
-To the spirit world 2!!
-To the spirit world 3!!
-To the spirit world part 2!!
-To Mideel 2!!
-To Hell!

[4] Stupid......
Didn't you know?
This is Hell.

[5] So? Have you decided?
A grand adventure is waiting.

[6] You're going to Mideel, right?
Okay!
So, go.

[7] Good luck!

[8] Eh? You, you're kidding......
You aren't going to try and step on me, right?

[9] I'm the floor, so
that's horrible!!

[10] Kyaa!
Ouch ouch ouch......
Owowowowow......!!

Takashi Tokita: N/A

'Materia' outtake

[YouTube link]

Tifa: Hey, don't scare us like that!
Barrett: I heard from Tifa... if you really want to participate that much, help us out with the next operation.
*Cloud brings out the materia*
Tifa: Wow, pretty! This is materia?
Cloud: Yeah. It withdraws an unknown power from humans.
Tifa: Why can we use this unknown power?
*Cloud shrugs*
Cloud: Why? ... I heard the answer before but I've forgotten. The only important thing is knowing how to use it.
Tifa: Okay then, how do you use it?
(Option 1: It's difficult but I'll explain...
Option 2: Too tiresome to explain...)
*player chooses option 2*
Barret: You won't explain because it's a SOLDIER secret, huh? Oh well, I know a little bit anyway. By the way, Cloud... why did you quit SOLDIER?
Cloud: It's no business of yours.
Barrett: WHAT!?
Tifa: Enough of that. Tomorrow's gonna be tough. We have to get some rest!
Barret: ........

The Scraping Sound You Can Hear Is That of Henry W. Fowler Turning In His Grave

Bad English is haunting me at present. I wandered through a bookshop and was offered the tale of 'The Extraordinary Race to Transplant the First Human Heart', leaving me indeed very curious about prehistoric surgery techniques. Then College sent me a residence contract which I think is meant to say I shan't get fed outside term time:

[The College agrees to provide] three meals a day (except by mutual agreement between the College and the JCR President for the time being) consisting of breakfast, lunch (except by mutual agreement) and dinner, to be taken in the Dining Hall or as otherwise arranged at the times advertised on notices prominently displayed in the College during the University Terms set out below only.

It would be nice to think they really do mean nothing more than that the notices aren't displayed during the vacation.