Wish I lived near Oakland so I could check out the exhibit of his work.

Nathan Rabin of the AV Club revisited notorious video game flop ET. I owned a copy. It was terrible, and the thump-dudda-thump-dudda-thump sound of ET gliding across the screen still haunts my dreams.

Here’s Rabin:

“As E.T., you must retrieve the telephone’s base components by exploring wells. There is an art and a science behind E.T.’s well-falling: Chose the right one, and you’re in a position to retrieve a third of the game’s holy grail. Fall down the wrong one, and you’re just wasting your time and depleting more of your valuable energy. Once you’ve fallen into a hole, you must use your magical powers to stretch out your neck and levitate out. Your reward is a 90 percent chance of immediately falling back in. While playing an online simulator of E.T.,I spent so much time falling into wells, deliberately and otherwise, that they began to seem less like an obstacle and more like a haunting metaphor for the inherent futility of all human and alien endeavor. Oh sure, you can struggle and strive and try to overcome, but really, you’re just going to plummet into some bottomless pit of your own devising over and over. Why bother trying to get out, when your own inherent weaknesses will only land you right back where you started?”

Read more here.

“I do have a certain amused contempt for the number of people who walk sideways into the thing and act like they were there all along. It’s selling more DVDs now than when it was on the air. But I’m indifferent to who thinks Omar is really cool now, or that this is the best scene or this is the best season. It was conceived of as a whole, and we did it as a whole. For people to be picking it apart now like it’s a deck of cards or like they were there the whole time or they understood it the whole time—it’s wearying. Because no one was there in the beginning, or the middle, or even at the end. Our numbers continued to decline from Season 2 on…”

More at the link above. I watched Treme via Netflix (and liked it very much). Does this earn his contempt?

“In the year since Judge Denny Chin invalidated Google’s agreement with the Authors’ Guild to display and sell digital editions of orphaned works, the towering monolith of search has been a sleeping giant in e-books. Still, every so often it tosses and turns, crushing villages and villagers caught in its slumbering shadow…”

From Wired. Read more at the link above.

infoneer-pulse:

When Santa Clarita began considering privatization, the decision drew national attention. It was, according to the New York Times, the first financially vibrant city to make the switch. 

Deputy City Manager Darren Hernandez is careful to stress that this decision was made because of LSSI’s “expertise” — “we didn’t have experience operating libraries,” he says — though he acknowledges that cost did play a role. The city thought they could run their system for $5.1 million a year; LSSI gets $3.8 million.

This savings means the city has been able to budget $4.8 million a year for libraries, with the extra $1 million going to buying new books and a new, LEED-certified building.

The bulk of the lower costs, both for the city and LSSI, comes from cutting the benefits previously afforded to librarians. Santa Clarita’s library staff has been removed from the state’s pension plan, and must instead contribute to a 401K. According to the American Libraries Association, this is the main reason library staffs tend to oppose privatization.

» via The Atlantic