No Hitter

I was surprised to see this article on concussions in hockey. In it, Hall-of-Fame players Eric Lindros and Ken Dryden argue for radical action on concussions, including a seemingly unthinkable ban on hitting. You might expect that from the intellectual goalie Dryden, but it’s a shock coming from Lindros, who made his living as a physical player. But after a career derailed by concussions, he plays non-contact hockey for recreation, and has been surprised that he still enjoys it.

That brings up Thing I Don’t Get About Hockey, #973: much of the hockey that actually gets played is non-contact. Women’s hockey doesn’t have body checking, children at an early age don’t either. And a lot of the recreational leagues don’t. And yet, whenever anyone discusses violence in hockey, experts talk about the physical nature of the game as being integral. Take it away and it’s not the same sport anymore. So by implication, women, children, and part-time players are playing some other sport. Those ads we keep seeing during commercial breaks pleading with parents to let their kids play hockey, are in fact, encouraging them to play some weird de-fanged facsimile of the sport. It’s a hypocrisy where the sport’s gatekeepers want us to keep the sport violent, but also want to maintain the idea that the sport is a wholesome part of Canadian society.

To be clear, I don’t for a second believe that removing the physical contact from the game is going to happen any time soon, but having respected players talk seriously about it is going to shift what is acceptable in discussion. The sport’s going to need major changes to make the sport safe, but so far, they haven’t been willing to make changes that will change how the sport is played, unlike the NFL. But if respected folks are going around talking about a massive overhaul, then those play-changing alterations will seem more palatable.

I’m also glad that Dryden brings up another point that I wish someone would acknowledge: just how much the game has changed over the years. He notes that if you look back at games from the 50’s - 60’s, there’s actually less hitting than now. That’s something I’ve noticed whenever the CBC shows old games late at night. Even as late as the 1980’s, you can see a distinct reduction in the physicality of the game. Specifically, there seems to be a different philosophy, with players often passing up the opportunity to hit another player. Today, in the same position, anyone would hit an opposing player at any opportunity; there’s no question of tactics or choosing when to hit, you just hit anyone you can any time you can, that’s how it’s done.

But Dryden points out that it’s not hard to understand why there was less hitting: in the original-six era, shifts were much longer than they are now. Players didn’t have the energy to hit everything that moved, and even if they did, no one had the energy to get up the speed to hit particularly hard.

Oh, and this leads to Thing I Don’t Get About Hockey, #1,562: Hockey is an extremely traditional sport, yet no one seems to care that it keeps changing. I always thought that the fundamental difference between hockey and baseball is embodied by the implements of the sports: the bat and the stick. Both baseball bats and hockey sticks are traditionally made of wood. But as soon as someone considered making the bats out of something else, they immediately banned the concept and assured everyone that bats would be forever made out of wood. In hockey, they started making the sticks out of carbon fibre, and no one said a word. The players quietly made the revolutionary change without much pushback from the sport’s traditionalists who howl at any rule change. Now wood sticks are as rare as players with perfect teeth.

Similarly, if you ask anyone, they’ll say they never want the game to change, even though it’s now totally different from what it once was. Hopefully, more people will recognize how much and how frequently the sport changes on its own, and realize that we can improve it when necessary.

Who’s A Good Ancestral Wolf?

There’s this new movie called Alpha, about the first ever pet dog. It looks like another of those movies that is going straight for heartwarming, without any big stars or promises of explosions or special effects. I don’t know how it got a summer release instead of going straight to download. Or straight to the Walmart $5 DVD bin that somehow just keeps going no matter how many people abandon DVD’s.

And, of course, it has dogs, which can carry a movie all on its own.

I was wondering if it even had religious overtones. I know that seems like a stretch, but in today’s movie industry, if a movie doesn’t have stars, action, comedy, or art house chic, it’s a mystery how it even exists. I start to wonder if it’s an extension of some brand that’s really popular in the American-Christian subculture.

But then it hit me: this movie is set — according to the ads — 20,000 years ago. Apparently, that’s based on some guesswork, since dogs might have been domesticated before or after that date. But still, 20,000 years. That’s an American family movie taking place 20,000-screw-you-Young-Earth-Creationists-years-ago. So it’s not just non-religious, it’s going to be offending the super-Christian. That’s kind of surprising. I’m sure that for entertainment aimed at the entirety of American culture, they would probably choose to take science’s side and assume that the Christian Fundamentalist boycott wouldn’t amount to much. But for family-friendly entertainment I would think that they would rather have hard-core religious families on side, and just let Neil DeGrasse Tyson rant about the inaccuracies. That’s especially given that this movie is going to have appeal to people who aren’t really in love with the usual Hollywood fare.

So this is kind of a weird concept: heartwarming family science. And I just read a review that pointed out that the stars in the sky are accurate even taking into account the drift of stars over those twenty millennia. So now I’m picturing Neil DeGrasse Tyson in the theatre weeping along with everyone else, having never seen such scientific accuracy in a movie.

The Twenty-First Century's Yesterday

Comic book author Warren Ellis pointed out something interesting. He's looking forward to next year, because it was the year when the original Blade Runner took place. No, it's not because he's saving up for one of those cool florescent light umbrellas. He points out that it is the last thing in science-fiction. We all lived through 2001 without any monoliths, and went right through 2015 without hoverboards. But next year will be our last future year. I would point out that it's not just Blade Runner: Akira also took place that year. That will be -20 geek points, Mr. Ellis.

Of course, it's not really the last sci-fi future: Buck Rogers is still waiting for us in the twenty-fifth century. And all of Star Trek has yet to happen, even Khan conquering a quarter of the world. That was supposed to happen in the 1990's, and he's really taking his time about it. The point is, when it comes to near-future science-fiction stories, the predictions run out after the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century.

That's not too surprising. Back in the twentieth century, 2000 was pretty much what people thought of when they thought of the future. There wasn't much need for a sci-fi author to set a story any further into the future. That would be like saying that the story took place the day after the future. So now those of us who lived in the twentieth century have to get used to the idea that we're living beyond what was once our future.

(As an aside: I referenced the light-up umbrellas in Blade Runner above, even though I was pretty sure that I remembered seeing that someone was actually selling them. So I looked it up, and found that they were available, but are no longer being sold. So that seals the argument that we are now ahead of the future.)

Ellis thinks that this development will be liberating, because there are no longer any expectations handed to society by our fiction. That's good, because it's always been disappointing when we cross one of these future anniversaries. Above, I referred to how 2015 didn't measure up to the future depicted in Back To The Future II. And to me, the big symbol of disappointment in the future was 2001, which represented incredible discovery as a movie, while the real-life year will always be associated with a shocking act of terror that represented humanity at its worst.

So I'll also look forward to not having it occasionally shoved in my face that the world's future is not as good as I was promised. I'll miss the invitations to nostalgia, but in today's world, that's hardly a problem.

Hey, You, Get On To My Cloud

I’ve noticed a problem creeping into technology: So often, we don’t know what to call things. It used to be simple: WordPerfect was a “program” or “application.” MySpace was a “website.” Angry Birds was an “app.”

But now those are blurred together. Facebook is a website that is a social network. But many people access it on an app. Instagram caught people’s attention as a photography app, but it also allows people to access a social network. And you can access that social network through a website.

Yes, I know, this isn’t exactly rocket science. But it starts to break down whenever you’re talking to people who don’t have the best knowledge of technology. People want to try to classify a thing, and that’s difficult when so much of today’s technology is really an abstract service that is available in a number of ways.

In their effort to try to understand things, a person with little acquaintance with technology will often hang on to a particular classification. Say, they first encountered Facebook on the web, so in their minds it is, and will always be, a web site. But they first use Twitter as an app, so it will always be an app. So this person thinks of these two things as apples and oranges, even though they do essentially the same thing. And this sometimes leads to people trying to make bizarre arguments, like that Facebook is less popular than Instagram because people prefer apps to websites.

That’s why the “cloud” analogy — annoying though it may be — is quite useful. The cloud concept may be poorly understood by much of the mainstream population, but in today’s world that may be helpful. A vaguely-defined amorphous concept is pretty useful for defining services that may manifest themselves in our lives in multiple ways.

Surface Tension

Microsoft has a new, cheaper version of its Surface tablet. The Surface Go is a 10” table for C$529, which puts it close to the cheapest iPads. That seems like a good move. I never understood Microsoft’s early attempts at a tablet. In general, I don’t understand why they feel the need to make tablets, but that’s another issue. The first Surfaces were very high-end, and I wondered how much market there is for tablets that are more expensive than nearly all laptops. On top of that, there’s the question of how many people want a super expensive tablet but haven’t bought them from Apple. It’s like when VW periodically tries making an expensive car; it may well be a nice car, but I’m not buying a luxury vehicle from Volkswagen.

But with the Surface Go, Microsoft seems to have taken a sensible approach to deliver an inexpensive but still powerful tablet, so they apparently think there’s a good market there. That’s interesting, because it’s been about ten years now that computer makers have been fussing around trying to make a new computing format, something that’s portable, affordable, and convenient.

First we had the netbooks. They started off as microscopic laptops with flash memory and custom Linux-based operating systems — essentially they were small versions of today’s Chromebooks. That seemed like an intriguing idea, but people weren’t ready to make such a big break with the past, and soon netbooks had hard drives and Windows, which made them less cheap, portable and usable.

Then tablets took off, and while they’ve been popular, they haven’t been super-profitable for manufacturers. And as a personal observation, they’ve been kind of an awkward proposition: you can get a really cheap tablet which you can use for many things, but it will be far from a replacement for a laptop/desktop. You can use it for e-mail and some web surfing, but many web pages won’t work well on a small screen and underpowered processor. And slightly larger jobs like typing this blog entry won’t be easy.

But there seems to be a new format coalescing: you can get a 9.7” iPad with a keyboard case for about $500, and now Microsoft is aiming at a similar price-point. I find that tablets at this level are much more capable what with their screen and computing power, and an unobtrusive keyboard opens up many more uses, while still keeping the device more portable than a laptop. And sure enough, I’m typing this on one of those iPad/keyboard pseudo laptops.

So I think we’ve finally figured out the formula for a new computing format. I don’t see this replacing anything: there’s still things laptops are better at, smaller tablets are significantly cheaper, and phones are much more portable. But the 9-10” tablet/keyboard is a very useful setup. My apologies to that kid in the “what’s a computer” Apple commercial. You were on to something. But it’s still a computer.

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served A Decade Later

When I was a kid, I was a fan of a sitcom called Silver Spoons. It didn’t make a big pop-cultural impact, so it doesn’t get the nostalgia of a contemporary like, say, Diff’rent Strokes.

It was about a single man-child father trying to raise his estranged son. I should explain that this was when man-child meant a man with a child-like nature, rather than the current definition which would evoke images of Charlie Sheen or President Trump. In today’s terms I’d describe it as a Disney Chanel show back before there was such a thing: aimed at tweens, with a silly but not entirely fantastical premise.

I think one reason I liked it was that it was kind of dorky. I mean, it was a show about a kid trying to survive junior high while also living in a house that had a giant toy train. Somehow I could relate to that better than portrayals of kids happily diving headlong into the world of the teenager.

Of course, dorky doesn’t sell. Well, it didn’t sell in the 80’s. So they introduced a new character. Again, with the wisdom of experience, I can see that they were adding a Scrappy-Doo/Poochie character: someone who had what marketing wanted, but didn’t really fit the show. In this case, it was a cool character that captured the zeitgeist.

And that character was played by Alphonso Ribero. At that time, he was a precocious young teen determined to carve out stardom as a triple-threat, even if no one actually used that term anymore. This was at the height of Michael Jackson’s career, and it really seemed like a he was being promoted as a junior version, a fact underlined in this Pepsi commercial featuring them both.

You’ve probably already figured out the ironic ending to this tale. Silver Spoons and Ribero’s early career faded into obscurity, but then he got another job in another decade. That was on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing the exact opposite character. Fresh Prince would be popular enough to grab a big estate on nostalgia island, and now that’s what he’s remembered for. So now my inner ten-year-old gets some revenge: I was annoyed by Ribero at the time for being shoved in my face as the cool kid, but now he’s remembered for dorkiness. It’s another example of how pop-cultural entities may seem all-powerful and unavoidable at the time, but will end up as fallible as the rest of us in the end.

Unready Player One

My very first post on this blog was a joke about Facebook games. I mostly stayed away from them, as they felt more like psychology experiments than recreation.

Since then, I've been playing a lot of mobile games. They have some of the same qualities, since free games need to make money somehow. But fortunately, they lack that hard sell you have to keep playing and paying to cheat. But they still have a structure that is built around at least the possibility of selling things. For instance, they’ll have some sort of power-up concept, because it will be easy to sell a power-up to the gamer when they get frustrated. And that’s becoming the accepted style for free mobile games.

It's weird how games can develop their own cultures. I first noticed this in university when some of us found out there was a 3d Tetris. Thing is, it was put out by Nintendo, and they had, well, Nintendified it. In contrast to the original Tetris, which was simple and minimal. When we tried playing it, it prompted the player to choose a character. That just seemed kind of childish. Sure, for a lot of folks this was natural, because they were Nintendo fans who were introduced to the original Tetris that way. But those of us who had loved the game as a work time-waster just felt stupid.

Now I sometimes find myself experiencing a similar clash of gaming cultures. For instance, I’ve wasted many an hour playing the Cell Connect game app. It's a simple abstract puzzle game. After playing it for a while, it was updated, and they've clearly decided to make it more in the style of app and social media games. The changes aren't too intrusive, but they are confusing.

Power up cards? Um, okay. Getting 5% bonus is nice, but it's not as exciting as invulnerability or something. The second card is a raccoon, what the hell does that mean? And now I've leveled up. This isn't an RPG, so I’m not even sure what that could mean.

In short, all these changes have made gaming rather complicated. Ironically, I just came across this article from Wired in which they examine the huge popularity of Fortnite, and argue that it is surprising since it is a fairly complex game,in contrast to lowest-common-denominator games like Angry Birds or Candy Crush. But it seems to me that even games aimed at the mass market have their own complexity, but it is within a culture of its own.