It's Time to Fire the Canon

Let me start by saying I'm a big nerd. When I was a teenager, I read every Star Wars book I could get my hands on. At my last job, I won a campus-wide Star Wars trivia contest. I've been watching Star Wars (less so now) since as far back as I can remember.

So, when Disney bought Star Wars, as well as some other less appreciated assets of LucasFilm, my nerd sense tingled. I wondered what they'd do to this part of my upbringing.

Then I realized a few things.

1. They couldn't do much worse than what George Lucas was doing to it.

2. They didn't ruin the Muppets, something I like much more than Star Wars.

3. In the grand scope of things, it doesn't matter. While Disney's has made some stinkers, like Alice in Tim Burton-land and Oz the Great and Mysogynistic, they have made some gems. I did enjoy The Muppets, but haven't yet had a chance to see Most Wanted. However, let's assume Disney drops the ball with Star Wars VII. Does that take away from our enjoyment of all that came before?

So, when Disney announced their doing away with the EU (that's not the European Union, but rather something more important to nerds: the Star Wars extended universe), nerd rage was on a rise.

None of it came from me, though. And I'll tell you why it shouldn't be a big deal.

First off, Disney isn't destroying or obliterating these library of books. Worst case, they'll become collectors items if they're not republished. Whether or not they're canon (they never really were) doesn't change the fact that they exist.

Second, it's fiction. Really. They're not real people. When they killed off Chewbacca, people freaked. He's a fictional fuzzball. He never existed, and therefore never can die.

Besides, most nerds so caught up with canon have written something called fan fiction. For those who haven't peeked below that rock, fan fiction are stories set in the "universe" of a (usually) that tell stories not told, or told differently, by the original source.

The only difference between someone like Kevin J Anderson and Mary Sue Skywalker is that KJA got paid to do it.

So, when you consider the fact that it's fiction, the only hindrance to the story as a whole being any good is really your imagination. It doesn't matter if one official story tells it one way, it's all in how you interpret the tale.

Granted, this won't stop flame wars over whether or not Dumbledore's gay, but it's something you can carry around on the inside.

At this point, the only thing keeping the canon alive is the fact that we nerds need a common reference when discussing a particular work or body of works. Let's try something else, as a house is only as strong as it's foundation, and the canon as an idea is not that strong of a foundation.

I believe that we nerds should reference our sources when making arguments regarding fictional characters and events. And the rest of the nerds should respect that.

Think of it like arguing religion with someone who has a different Holy Book than you. After all, the word "canon" comes from religion, and the scope of a canon only extends to that subset of that religion.

Ultimately, though, much like with religions, if you find enough like minded people, you can form a group whose canon includes something not recognized by the "official" canon. There, you've started something new, something we've been doing for ages already.

Let me know what you think.

To My Hyland Successor

This is not a rant. This is merely advice.

Congratulations, you're Hyland Software's newest Conversion Engineer. If you're a new hire, you're probably fresh out of college. Congratulations on your new job. If you're an internal hire, congratulations on your new position.

If you're anything like the rest of the group, you're a white male, but if you're not, I'm glad to hear that Conversion Services is getting more diverse.

If you're a college hire, I hope you're making at least $70k. If you're an internal hire, I hope you're making at least $80k. Otherwise, you're not getting paid enough. Even then you're probably underpaid.

But you don't have to be underappreciated! You can be a vital asset to your team. Not only can you debug software problems for your coworkers who have been developing software longer than you, but you can also contribute new concepts to the team's way of doing things. Granted, most of your suggestions won't be heard unless you provide a solid proof of concept. And still then, be prepared for it to be straw-manned.

The best way to survive your new job is as follows:

1. If you don't have a family, great. Try not to develop any committed relationships. You'll eventually have to choose, and in this case, there's no right answer. Just ask your coworkers. One is in the process of getting a divorce, and is losing out in more ways than one, as his ex is a lawyer. Another has a daughter who's recently come to need psychiatric help, as daddy's little princess isn't daddy's little priority anymore. Another sees women as a means to an end. Finally, the last, while a family man, has kids that complain to mom that they don't see dad enough. If you are in a relationship, set some ground rules with your partner, as that's the only edge in this triangle who will bend.

2. All work-sponsored events are optional, but not really. If you're not part of the culture, you're not part of the family that Hyland claims it treats it's employees like. The only time they're optional is when they interfere with your job, even when they're mandatory.

3. All department-sponsored events are the same. It's more important for you to go to Swings-n-Things with your department than attend a benefits meeting with HR.

4. All group activities are the same too. If you get invited to play poker, play poker. If you're a compulsive gambler, well, just deal with it. If you don't drink, well, start. If you're not one of them, you're not one of them.

5. Don't bother coming in early. Nobody cares. Even if you come in 2 hours before everybody else, they'll want you to stay 2 hours past the time most people leave.

6. Vacations and holidays are optional. While you don't get reimbursed for these if they're not taken, be prepared to work through select holidays. And if you schedule a vacation, be prepared to take a laptop with you. You just better hope they have good 4G reception where you're going.

7. In fact, you had better sleep with your phone. This helps if you're already doing 1.

8. If life happens to you, you're just out of luck. A leaky roof? Well, put a bucket under it until the next conversion project is done.

9. Make sure your management knows how important your work is to you. Project a sense of urgency, because if they don't see it, they will assume the opposite.

10. Don't ever go to HR for problems with management. If you have a problem with management and it's not breaking the law, deal with it. If it is, tell the press. You'll lose your job, but make a killing in publicity rights.

11. Keep the resume updated and don't bring anything important with you to work. You could be fired at the drop of a hat. And they'll treat you like a criminal trespasser when they terminate your employment. So, if you want your personal affects to not be far away, don't take 'em to work.

That's a smattering of my advice.

Be prepared for a lot of doublethink. Be prepared to love your job even if you hate it. Be prepared to be passionate about what you do, even if it's only a means to survival. Be prepared to put everything that's important to you on the back burner. Be prepared to "walk through a brick wall for a customer".

Be prepared to work at Hyland.

Sofia At The End of Time

When you're the father of a young child, you find yourself watching Disney Junior from time to time. When you have a daughter, you tend to watch Sofia the First.

The premise of the show follows a girl, Sofia, whose mother, the village cobbler, makes a pair of shoes for the king, Roland II. The king then marries the woman, and he incorporates the two into his royal family, including his two children. As a welcome-to-the-family gift, Roland gives Sofia a special amulet which secretly grants her the ability to talk with animals and to summon Disney Princesses during dire situations.

The show, true to Disney's more recent endeavors, features a world populated by a homogeneous mixture of races. While each kingdom represented in the show has a real world parallel (if not in the UN, then definitely in EPCOT), the Kingdom of Enchantsia, Sofia's home kingdom seems mostly based on America, granted, with a king.

In a discussion with my wife one day after a Sofia marathon, the subject came up of where this show took place. After much debate, we determined that it's not meant to be a past version of our world, as every Disney princess is supposed to appear at one point, including Pocahontas, who lived around the 1600s.

[Edit: I forgot to include Tiana. That pushes the date forward to the 1920s.]

That left two really solid hypotheses: 1. That Sofia et al. live on a different planet that somehow has access to Disney media, or my personal favorite: 2. That Sofia the First takes place in a distant, post-apocalyptic future earth, where the only culture to survive is Disney. Sofia's amulet, the Amulet of Avalor, is a remaining piece of Imagineer technology, allowing her to summon projections of all the Disney Princesses.

The kingdoms themselves are close enough together where they could conceivably be on the remains of the Disney parks and resorts.

Nevertheless, Sofia the First helps support my Grand Unified Theory of Disney. I'll probably talk about it at length several times, but the gist is: every Disney movie (etc.) takes place in a shared universe.

If you have any addition theories regarding Sofia, I'd be glad to hear them.

Hello, Again

Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Jacob. I currently live is a quiet town in Northeast Ohio. I am married, have a daughter, and have a cat.

I work in the software industry, but also enjoy writing. While I haven't made much money from my writing, I still enjoy doing it.

In my free time, I read or work on my house, when I'm not spending that time with my family.

I hope to start blogging once again. I'll try to blog regularly, and talk about topics that interest me. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

I guess that's it for now. Happy reading!

The Who Prize

After reading the Wired article a few months back regarding lost media gems. Some of those particular gems are the lost Doctor Who episodes.

For those not familiar with Doctor Who, the series has been running in one form or another since the 60s. The main character, the Doctor, has had 11 official incarnations since the show's inceptions, and each doctor is indicated by their ordinal, e.g., the Xth Doctor (albeit, in outside material; within the show, he's just "the Doctor").

The missing episodes are products of the original media being destroyed (intentionally) by BBC to clear room in their storage. Fortunately, for many of the episodes in this case, there existed either home video recordings or foreign distributions that somehow found their way back to BBC, to be digitally remastered and then released to the public. However, there are still many episodes missing, and all of these missing episodes are from the First and Second Doctors' tenure.

When I tried to introduce my wife to Doctor Who, I thought that starting at the beginning would be a good idea. However, this is not necessarily the best way, as there are a lot of gaps. I wanted to show her the missing episodes, but could only find the audio recordings, the novelizations, and some fan recreations of varying quality.

When BBC released "The Invasion," a Second Doctor serial with missing episodes, they used an animation company (who had previously done a web serial called "Scream of the Shalka" with an alternate Tenth Doctor, now known as the Shalka Doctor, played by Robert E. Grant) called Cosgrove Hall. The quality was akin to Flash-animations, but it was an episode nonetheless. To my knowledge they have used Cosgrove for other Who-related things, including a Tenth Doctor animated series, and to recreate parts of "The Reign of Terror", a First Doctor serial about the French Revolution. Likewise, some company (I'm not sure which) is supposedly doing some CG work on a previously untelevised, unfinished Fourth Doctor serial, written by Douglas Adams, called "Shada."

I think, though, that to funnel all the work through one or a few companies is taking too long to get the lesser popular episodes in suitable forms for the public, so I'm proposing BBC do the following:

Set up a website for "The Who Prize," in which investors may pledge money towards lost episodes. These pledges may be a general pledge, or a per-episode pledge, or even some other sort of pledge to suit the situations that may arise with respect to missing and lost episodes (such as a finder's prize if something turns up). It's important that the BBC also grant amnesty towards anybody who has been otherwise afraid of revealing that they have a copy.

The other side of the site would be the creative side. These people would pick an episode, have access to the surviving media, and produce a suitable reconstruction of the episode, be it computer animation, 2D animation, or even reenactment. These videos would be submitted to the site, and viewable by either the general public, the site's members, the judges, or some other set of individuals to which viewing abilities would be of merit. The judges would select the best version of an episode, or, at their discretion, best versions to splice together professionally, and the winner or winners would receive a cut of the prize in exchange for turning the rights of the video over to BBC.

Making the videos available to some subset of the general public, too, would enable users to rank their favorites, which would help filter out videos of lesser quality.

I think, though, that if we took the problem of the missing and lost Doctor Who episodes, and crowdsourced them, we'd not only get it done a whole lot faster, but we'd also get a more diverse mix of talent helping to restore a lost page of a science fiction classic.

Until then, let's hope that Cosgrove and BBC have a wonderful working relationship.

The Social Not-Work

Hey, remember when everybody used AOL? It was this nice hedged garden that gave you e-mail and chat and instant messaging, and cost you like $30 a month. It was so cool, and hip, and in, that everybody important used it, and businesses wanted to capture that market too, so they made AOL pages, accessible via AOL Keywords. So, that latest movie to come out? You could read all about it at http://www.geocities.com/plutobay/201328457291/movie_title.html or at AOL Keyword Awesome Film of 1998!

But then something happened: The internet became an always-on think. You gave extra money to your cable company, and they gave you a little box that turned a bunch of 0's and 1's into pictures of cats doing silly stuff while sans-serif fonts provided commentary for their actions. Suddenly you didn't have to open AOL to see the Internet. You could venture into that wild jungle without even needing to go through a hedge maze. So, AOL responded: if you don't use us for your Internet connection, we'll give you a discount. And some people did that. Likewise, AOL introduced AIM, so you could chat with all of your non-AOL friends without having to leave AOL.

But, still, AOL could provide nothing, other than an e-mail account, and maybe a list of Top 10 Jokes about some celebrity or current event, to keep people around. And then they sort of fell into obscurity, such that whenever you see someone with an @aol.com e-mail address, you wonder if they're a time traveler or something. And then you wonder when you'll get an e-mail from someone using Prodigy....

AOL was an early walled garden whose bulwarks eventually crumbled. But it was eventually supplanted by some Ivy League fellow who, emulating other sites, like Friendster and Classmates (one of which was actually worthwhile), he introduced yet another social network, Facebook. Facebook got its roots with university-only user base, so early adopters felt a little high-brow, especially when compared to the new Geocities, MySpace.

Nowadays, you can find Friendster only in the Wayback Machine, and MySpace is like a derelict vessel in some sci-fi horror movie. While investigating it, you hear strange noises, and one by one, your away team begins to vanish, until, BOOM, Little Mama starts blaring about her lip gloss, and you have an epileptic seizure due to a color scheme selected by someone who was either extremely color blind, or was trying to be "artistic."

So, Facebook kinda won the Social Network Game, and many people tried to capture that fame. Twitter introduced streaming inanity, and in response, Facebook made their Wall system more inane. Twitter, really, was one of the few contenders that was able to stand up against Facebook.

And then it happened, Facebook was more visited that Google!? So, Google decides it's in their best interest to play the Facebook game.

So, they introduce Buzz, which is pretty cool. It's like the Facebook Wall, only able to be used outside of Facebook. But it didn't catch on, especially after a whole big mess about privacy. Ouch!

And then Google introduced Wave, which was also pretty cool. It would have revolutionized the work place, especially dreaded meetings, but every single company blocked it as a "chat site." So it didn't catch on.

And then Google introduced Plus (or Google+), which, as the xkcd comic says: is like Facebook, but not Facebook. This gets Facebook's attention. How can Facebook compete with a Facebook that's more open about its content?

To counter Google Takeout, which lets you export your Google+ account (and other Google stuff) in a flash, Facebook decides to block the Google Chrome plugin that lets users export their Facebooks to Google Plus.

And to counter Google's super-easy video conferencing chat deal that is fairly prominent in Google+, Facebook decides to ... what? Integrate with Skype?

Double Fail.

So, remember this, people of the present, when people of the future (hi! future people!) liken Facebook to Prodigy in their Early Days of the Internet 101.

Zhang and Battle.net

Have you gotten this e-mail:

Hello zhang,

Welcome to Battle.net!

You have successfully created the following Battle.net account:

[removed]

The Battle.net account is a centralized account system that will let you manage all of the Blizzard Entertainment games you play, including World of Warcraft and future games, in one place without having to remember multiple sets of login information.

We highly recommend that you take this opportunity to verify your e-mail address. Verifying your e-mail address will unlock extra Battle.net account features, including the ability to register Blizzard games you own so that you can download them, free of charge, any time you want. To do so, simply click here:

https://sea.battle.net/account/email/confirm.xml?ticket=[removed]

In addition, you may also merge any World of Warcraft accounts you play with this Battle.net account. After merging, you will log in to the game and its associated online services such as World of Warcraft Account Management, the World of Warcraft Forums, and the World of Warcraft Armory, using your Battle.net login information. You can begin the account merge process at the Battle.net account homepage, located at http://www.battle.net/account.

Please retain this e-mail for your reference.

For more information, click here for answers to Frequently Asked Questions or to contact the Blizzard Billing & Account Services team.

Sincerely,
The Battle.net Account Team
Online Privacy Policy

Well, you're not alone. Apparently, zhang has been submitting new account creations for a bunch of e-mail addresses.

I'm not sure where zhang got these e-mail addresses. Most likely, from someone's address book, either a big name company or your best bud who just downloads too many questionable applications. Some have claimed it's part of the Sony hack, but this is pure speculation.

Nevertheless, this is a REAL e-mail from Battle.net. The links do not redirect, and the header is from an actual Battle.net origin. sea.battle.net is for the South East Asia servers. Your e-mail address probably didn't get hacked (if you use Gmail, you have a nice little option to see last account activity; it's probably pretty boring...).

Here's what you should do:

1. If you're ever wanting to create a Battle.net server, contact customer support (http://us.blizzard.com/support/index.xml) and have them fix the account for you.

2. DO NOT CLICK THE LINK; DO NOT POST THE LINK TO A FORUM OR BLOG; This link activates the account for that user (Zhang Somethingorother). If you do, you'll have to resort to step 1.

3. If you really don't care, delete the e-mail and get on with your life. Stop downloading questionable applications, and update your virus scanner once in a while.

I'm personally disappointed to see how Battle.net support and other people are reacting to this. Reaction 1: It's a phishing attempt! Reaction 2: You got hacked! Reaction 3: Anything but us letting people try to sign up for a billion accounts with the same name, etc.

Why, though?

Why is zhang trying to create a Battle.Net account with my e-mail address?

Because zhang wants you to click that link and activate the account, and let him/her/it play WoW nonstop under a multitude of accounts that wouldn't otherwise be used by people for Battle.net. Since WoW released F2P, I imagine gold farming has become a much more tempting vocation, and perhaps a bunch of accounts would help continue to do so, in case one account gets banned, or there's some sort of limits put on each account. And then, in the end, if anything bad happens, it's on you, not zhang.

Zhang will want to get a lot of accounts, in case there's a few people who are actually smart and scrutinize things a bit.

So stop the gold farming and don't click that link (even if you did sign up for Battle.net :P)!