DEAR MEN,
WHEN YOU ENTER THE BATHROOM AND SEE THAT ALL THE STALLS ARE ALREADY OCCUPIED, YOU DO NOT NEED TO "WASH YOUR HANDS" METICULOUSLY BEFORE LEAVING. IT'S OBVIOUS THAT YOU WANTED TO POOP AND ONLY AFTER ENTERING THE BATHROOM DID YOU REALIZE THAT THERE WAS NO POOPING VENUE AVAILABLE. AND THAT'S FINE. BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME.
i'm writing a lot of diss stuff right now, so no time for real posts.
lol, pooping.
Feb 16, 2012
Feb 10, 2012
mysterious dungeons of desktop castles of dredmor (the roguelike)
i suppose that this is a review of sorts, but neither game i want to write about is officially finished, so titling it a "review" in earnest seems a little unfair. of course, if you play indie games at all (which i do) pretty much every fucking game in the universe comes out nowadays in "alpha", "beta", "triad", "delta" and "half-cocked" stages for everyone to buy, and only 2 years later is it revealed that because the game is so not-mainstream it'll never actually be "finished", dude. because actually finishing is for The Man, or something.
so yeah. i want to write a little bit about some roguelikes i've been playing, how a game that forces you to constantly do basic math can still be fun, and how sometimes i get so fucking mad at video games i really just want to kill and eat somebody, anybody, to make the pain stop.
and now that i have scared the absolute SHIT out of you, here we go.
this is a tale of two roguelikes: mysterious castle and desktop dungeons (and, to a lesser extent, dungeons of dredmor). so maybe i should talk first about what the hell a roguelike is, in case you don't know. according to the internet, "The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue." according to game designers, however, a roguelike is "whatever the hell we want it to be because people tend to buy games with words like 'roguelike', 'procedurally-generated world' and 'permadeath' in the description this year".
if you're benedict cumberbatch's sherlock holmes, you can probably tell from the capitalization in the first quote that i pasted it in here from wikipedia, while you can probably tell from the lack of capitalization in the second quote that i made it the fuck up. but they're both completely true!
so. i got into roguelikes the way that i got into pretty much anything i've done that's been fun in the last two years except for high-speed sledding: minecraft. among many, many other things, i was drawn to minecraft because of the procedural generation of the gameworld, its stressing of freeform exploration, and the very heavy consequences of failure/death (there's no permadeath, but death is still a huge pain in the ass, unlike in most games nowadays). i hadn't really seen these qualities expressed in a game together before. they were new to me, and they were exciting. never-ending, randomized worlds? fuck yeah! with no map or totally prescriptive goals, so you can just wander but still feel a sense of accomplishment just by surviving? that's how i feel about real life, so YEAH! so when i started to see lots of other games with these buzzwords attached to them (unsurprisingly, shortly after minecraft blew up like a skyscraper-sized creeper), often for 2-3 bucks on steam, i started buying them by the virtual fistful. very quickly, though, this buying spree brought me to wonder if roguelikes were actually supposed to be fun, or if they were instead just some weird mutation of a "game" that you "play" for insanely sadomasochistic people who don't actually know what either of those words mean.
take, for example, dungeons of dredmor (or, as i like to think of it, rageons of ragemor). this is billed as a "beginner's roguelike", so unlike something completely fucking nutballs like rogue or dwarf fortress, dungeons at least acknowledges that there might be a bridge between semi-autistic dungeon-crawl savants and your typical frat boy whose gaming literacy only extends to the best camping spots on the latest iteration of modern warfare's multiplayer maps. dredmor acknowledges this by tricking impressionable gamers with a pretty interface and an interesting presentation style and then it crushes their goddamn skull to a pulp by striking it again and again with a huge microwave while belting out lyrics to korpiklaani songs at the top of its lungs.
dredmor is not a bad game, per se, but it's a game that makes me question if i understand what "game" really means. so much time needs to be spent sorting equipment, digging through loot piles, and interpreting excruciatingly detailed minutiae just to get past the game's first few levels that i felt like i was hooking up an HDTV/DVR combo instead of playing a video game. even on the rare occasion that i succeeded in completing a level (and had paid enough attention to understanding why i succeeded), i was just exhausted afterward. this trailer makes it look both fun and easy, but it was neither of those things for me.
i was intrigued by the game's premise: that a turn-based affair with potentially endless dungeons, heavily randomized loot and a modicum of stat-based strategy could have such a small focus: that you didn't need to command armies and the fate of the multiverse every time you took a turn, that you didn't need to micromanage the grain watering rate and the education levy percentage every time of ever province in your entire civilization every time you took a turn, that turn-based gaming could be a bit more personal than in something like civilization. distilled in such a way, turn-based gaming with a touch of roguelike-ness could be a satisfying puzzle generator. fortunately, the makers of desktop dungeons were apparently thinking the exact same thing.
desktop dungeons has been my favorite go-to activity during writing breaks for something like six months now. for one thing, the game hits that perfect balance between "easy to play" and "difficult to master", and as such, every time the dev team tweaks something or adds something or removes something else, it makes the game (in a sense) completely new without forcing you to relearn the basic rules. also, it does something brilliant by taking the rogue formula and not only making it more accessible but confining play sessions into quick 20-minute dungeon runs. this deals brilliantly with a problem that many devs haven't seemed to notice yet: that procedural generation can easily come to just mean "really huge, boring levels". i've felt this even a bit from time to time in minecraft: you're a player playing a game, ultimately, taking time out from your actual life to get caught up in the game's world, but also to feel the sense of accomplishment you get from, you know, accomplishing something. in minecraft, that "something" is often as simple as finding a new cave, forging a new plate of armor, or just climbing a mountain and checking out the surrounding landscape. often, though, this new breed of procedurally-generated, "open-world" game seems to assume that exploration for the sense of exploration is enough. but it's not. and desktop dungeons realizes that, and shrinks each dungeon adventure down into almost a puzzle-like, single-level encounter that, at the end, you either win or lose. the overworld map and all the game's unlockables make certain that you never lose a sense of the game's scale, but the small levels make sure you're always getting the feedback that makes gaming fun.
so basically, i think i'm perturbed by everything suddenly having to be roguelike because all that really seems to mean is "really difficult" and "devoid of ludic rewards". i'm no inexperienced or lazy gamer by any stretch of the imagination, and so while it's possible that i'm just bad at games like dredmor and castle, i think it's much more likely that they're just bad games. they might be good [insert something else], but i don't know what.
that said, i keep coming back to castle for some reason. there's something about the graphical style and the battle system that makes me keep thinking that if i can just get strong enough characters, the difficulty will taper off and i'll be able to enjoy what would otherwise be a really excellent little RPG/dungeon crawl. but i'll probably just quit in rage again 20 minutes from now, braining myself with my own water bottle and screaming obscenities that haven't been invented yet.
so yeah. i want to write a little bit about some roguelikes i've been playing, how a game that forces you to constantly do basic math can still be fun, and how sometimes i get so fucking mad at video games i really just want to kill and eat somebody, anybody, to make the pain stop.
and now that i have scared the absolute SHIT out of you, here we go.
this is a tale of two roguelikes: mysterious castle and desktop dungeons (and, to a lesser extent, dungeons of dredmor). so maybe i should talk first about what the hell a roguelike is, in case you don't know. according to the internet, "The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue." according to game designers, however, a roguelike is "whatever the hell we want it to be because people tend to buy games with words like 'roguelike', 'procedurally-generated world' and 'permadeath' in the description this year".
if you're benedict cumberbatch's sherlock holmes, you can probably tell from the capitalization in the first quote that i pasted it in here from wikipedia, while you can probably tell from the lack of capitalization in the second quote that i made it the fuck up. but they're both completely true!
so. i got into roguelikes the way that i got into pretty much anything i've done that's been fun in the last two years except for high-speed sledding: minecraft. among many, many other things, i was drawn to minecraft because of the procedural generation of the gameworld, its stressing of freeform exploration, and the very heavy consequences of failure/death (there's no permadeath, but death is still a huge pain in the ass, unlike in most games nowadays). i hadn't really seen these qualities expressed in a game together before. they were new to me, and they were exciting. never-ending, randomized worlds? fuck yeah! with no map or totally prescriptive goals, so you can just wander but still feel a sense of accomplishment just by surviving? that's how i feel about real life, so YEAH! so when i started to see lots of other games with these buzzwords attached to them (unsurprisingly, shortly after minecraft blew up like a skyscraper-sized creeper), often for 2-3 bucks on steam, i started buying them by the virtual fistful. very quickly, though, this buying spree brought me to wonder if roguelikes were actually supposed to be fun, or if they were instead just some weird mutation of a "game" that you "play" for insanely sadomasochistic people who don't actually know what either of those words mean.
take, for example, dungeons of dredmor (or, as i like to think of it, rageons of ragemor). this is billed as a "beginner's roguelike", so unlike something completely fucking nutballs like rogue or dwarf fortress, dungeons at least acknowledges that there might be a bridge between semi-autistic dungeon-crawl savants and your typical frat boy whose gaming literacy only extends to the best camping spots on the latest iteration of modern warfare's multiplayer maps. dredmor acknowledges this by tricking impressionable gamers with a pretty interface and an interesting presentation style and then it crushes their goddamn skull to a pulp by striking it again and again with a huge microwave while belting out lyrics to korpiklaani songs at the top of its lungs.
dredmor is not a bad game, per se, but it's a game that makes me question if i understand what "game" really means. so much time needs to be spent sorting equipment, digging through loot piles, and interpreting excruciatingly detailed minutiae just to get past the game's first few levels that i felt like i was hooking up an HDTV/DVR combo instead of playing a video game. even on the rare occasion that i succeeded in completing a level (and had paid enough attention to understanding why i succeeded), i was just exhausted afterward. this trailer makes it look both fun and easy, but it was neither of those things for me.
desktop dungeons has been my favorite go-to activity during writing breaks for something like six months now. for one thing, the game hits that perfect balance between "easy to play" and "difficult to master", and as such, every time the dev team tweaks something or adds something or removes something else, it makes the game (in a sense) completely new without forcing you to relearn the basic rules. also, it does something brilliant by taking the rogue formula and not only making it more accessible but confining play sessions into quick 20-minute dungeon runs. this deals brilliantly with a problem that many devs haven't seemed to notice yet: that procedural generation can easily come to just mean "really huge, boring levels". i've felt this even a bit from time to time in minecraft: you're a player playing a game, ultimately, taking time out from your actual life to get caught up in the game's world, but also to feel the sense of accomplishment you get from, you know, accomplishing something. in minecraft, that "something" is often as simple as finding a new cave, forging a new plate of armor, or just climbing a mountain and checking out the surrounding landscape. often, though, this new breed of procedurally-generated, "open-world" game seems to assume that exploration for the sense of exploration is enough. but it's not. and desktop dungeons realizes that, and shrinks each dungeon adventure down into almost a puzzle-like, single-level encounter that, at the end, you either win or lose. the overworld map and all the game's unlockables make certain that you never lose a sense of the game's scale, but the small levels make sure you're always getting the feedback that makes gaming fun.
mysterious castle, on the other hand, is like a not-quite terrible girlfriend when you're 16 years old: generally i'm unhappy around it, but it offers me something that i can't see to get anywhere else. in the metaphor this "something" would be sex, but in reality, i'm not entirely sure what it is about castle that's so absorbing. it is a game that was originally made for tablets, as is pretty obvious from the tablet-y (but still effective) interface. exploration is a bit more random in this game, but ultimately unsatisfying, because the game so badly wants to hold on to the roguelike aesthetic of "super-difficult, only for maniacs" that it sort of ruins itself. and with that, after about 2000 words, i've finally realized the thesis of all this shit that i'm writing. genre cross-pollination is well in good, in general and in games in particular. but i'm starting to think that making all games a little bit like roguelikes is not a great idea. the genre's qualities are very niche, and they're not something that transfers well. desktop dungeons works because it's a dungeon-crawling game with RPG elements, but it's self-imposed constraints (of scale, of time) make it more of an RPG/puzzle game than an RPG/roguelike. castles is troubling to me because it's actually really visually interesting, the battle system is efficient and intuitive, and fighting/looting is fun. with, say, a leveling mechanic, it would be a neat little RPG. instead, because it's interested in grafting roguelike elements onto its structure, it's something much less fun. every enemy encounter is a new terror: are you going to randomly meet enemies against which you can triumph? or are you going to meet enemies that slaughter you no matter what you do? either of these can happen at any time, without warning. and, because there's really no clear way to make your party stronger, faster, better armored, etc. (aside from random loot drops), there's never a real sense of progression. sure, i eventually got to the point where the absolutely easiest enemies in the game couldn't really effectively destroy me instantly because my new armor was too awesome. but then i just ran into a group of 20 of them instead of a group of 5 and they mutilated me. mysterious castles is like icewind dale if you took out the ability to level up and just threw the player in one of the game's dungeons randomly with no regard for how well-prepared they were.
that said, i keep coming back to castle for some reason. there's something about the graphical style and the battle system that makes me keep thinking that if i can just get strong enough characters, the difficulty will taper off and i'll be able to enjoy what would otherwise be a really excellent little RPG/dungeon crawl. but i'll probably just quit in rage again 20 minutes from now, braining myself with my own water bottle and screaming obscenities that haven't been invented yet.
two of my favorite diss-related images
i've been alternating between both of these as my desktop on my work computer for awhile now. they're both pretty interesting visual representations of a lot of the issues i'm writing about in my dissertation with regard to wilderness, civilization, and technology. plus, i took the first one myself. so there's that. the second one is made by someone else and superimposes a bit of minecraft landscape atop what i imagine is probably a 19th century landscape painting.
i've got another post in the pipe for later about roguelikes and why they generally (but not exclusively) enrage me as a genre of video game.
Feb 8, 2012
i'm a wheel
or at least i feel a bit like one.
i'm settled back into the writing nest at the moment, and have been for about 24 hours now, but this weekend turned out to be a pretty significant adventure (beyond even what i had expected).
way back when, in the days when i could imagine having free time, lindsey and i decided it would be fun to go see wilco a few times during their most recent west coast touring jaunt. two februaries ago, we took a weekend to catch them in both seattle and portland, and both shows were great, though at the time i lamented the fact that all wilco shows are more or less the same. of course, "the same" should be read "awesome", but i doubted the necessity of seeing back-to-back shows ever again. this time, though, one show was within a short driving distance of our friend john's apartment in portland and the other was a short distance from my own apartment, in spokane, and was taking place almost on my and lindsey's 3 year anniversary, at the spot where we'd met for the first time. it seemed imperative to go to both.
we left town late friday morning, and did the usual pullman-to-portland commute, shooting down 395/82 and then through the columbia river gorge. we made a quick stop-off just outside of the city proper to pick up john (who was visiting a friend in eugene, where the show was taking place), and then it was on to the hult center. as always, wilco was stellar. the setlist was a bit obvious, and i was likely a bit crotchety from not having eaten since we'd stopped at burgerville in the dalles early that afternoon, but that was offset somewhat by the fact that we'd stumbled on to second-row tickets.
after the show, i'd assumed that after having been awake for a million hours and driven almost 9 of them, we'd just head back to portland and sleep. instead, (fortunately, as it turned out ) we got to meet up with john and his friend, and went in search of food and drink in post-midnight eugene. this led us to an excellent pizza/beer joint called (i think) cosmic pizza and reheated vegetarian slices paired with an excellent vanilla stout. from there, things became a bit of a haze featuring organic american spirits and a rather enthusiastic eugenean (?) who kept insisting that "the spirit of the 1890s is ALIVE!" and solicited smooches from all four of us (lindsey included) before disappearing into her apartment building.
fortunately, john opted to drive back to portland, and so all i had to do for the next two hours was struggle to stay awake as the roadlights flashed by. i think we might have also listened to daft punk's discovery and kid a. upon arriving at john's apartment, i'm pretty sure i was asleep in less than five minutes. which was good, because there would be only a little rest for the wicked.
we woke up the next morning shortly after sunrise, but i was feeling pretty good. actual, legitimate sunrise in portland is such a rare thing that it's rather inspiring to experience. as such, i shook off my lethargy, forced lindsey to make me breakfast (women are for cooking!) and then settled in to work a bit on job applications and watch the city wake up.
it wasn't long before john woke up and gifted us with a second breakfast, and then we were off to bridal veil falls for a little (read: lot) of hiking.
our original plan for the day had involved a 2200 foot ascent to a place called devil's rest, over the course of a 3-or-so-mile hike, which we were then planning on retracing back to the parking lot. this hike would take us past some pretty amazing northwest coast basalt cliffs and accompanying waterfalls.
as might be expected, though, the lure of a entire day in which there was no school-related work to be done tempted us into a bit of laziness and we'd gotten on the road a lot later than we'd originally planned. as a result, we were only about two-thirds of the way to devil's rest before the sun began to go down in earnest. it became obvious we weren't going to make it up and back before dark, and hiking long distances over a dramatic elevation change in the dark sort of takes a trip out of "fun day hike" territory and straight into "possible survival scenario" territory. so we decided to turn around. and then we decided to run.
not for any necessary reason, mind you. we're just idiots. some of these idiots (read: me) were even wearing non-hiking shoes which were not happy about supporting my ankles in the least bit. as i type this, my toes are asking me "what were you thinking?!" over and over in the language of PAIN. nonetheless, breathlessly shambling down 1500 feet or so of altitude over 2 miles at a good jogging clip while jumping stones and exposed roots in near-darkness is a good way to make the best of a shortened hiking day.
upon our re-arrival in portland, we settled in for a typical john-style repast, featuring much more home-cooked food than could have been eaten by eight people, and store-bought vegan chicken wings from a portland restaurant called fire on the mountain that were quite possibly the best thing i have ever eaten in my entire life. for serious.
i don't remember much of the rest of that night, because the lack of sleep from the previous few days caught up with me in a huge way after dinner. i vaguely remember passing out (quite literally) from sleepiness shortly after the huge meal, and waking up briefly later that evening to say goodnight to everyone before dropping off again.
we woke up in the morning just before sunrise (due to an early bedtime) and got on the road by 10am, which opened up the whole day for an awesome, meandering drive along the north side of the columbia gorge on WA-14. this was amazing until about the time we reached the dalles bridge, when the road suddenly became covered by fog and stayed that way until we got to richland. eaten lunch at a great mexican restaurant in richland before finishing the drive back to pullman, though, put the perfect exclamation point on our first leg of the wilco-trip.
after an interlude of about 16 hours of frenetic work and worry and such, we left just before dinnertime on monday to get to spokane in time to eat and catch the second show. our dinner-location of choice was the fascinating (if you're an urban-spaces geek like me) steam plant grill in spokane, which had severely jacked up its prices since our last visit but still offered great food and an excellent vanilla bourbon stout. for the show proper, we were once again in the second row, which i know have found makes the show much easier to see, but less easy to hear. we had john stiratt's bass in our faces the entire night (not necessarily a bad thing), and the setlist was a lot more varied, and there was a seven-song encore.
by the end of the trip, i'd spent a little more time, money, and energy than i'd really planned for, but it was all worth it. after this, i'll likely be chaining myself to my writing desk for good until this dissertation is finished, so it was a nice send-off to freedom, and if wilco keeps up their habit of visiting the pacific northwest only once every two years, the memories will definitely make the wait for the next go-round more bearable.
i'm settled back into the writing nest at the moment, and have been for about 24 hours now, but this weekend turned out to be a pretty significant adventure (beyond even what i had expected).
way back when, in the days when i could imagine having free time, lindsey and i decided it would be fun to go see wilco a few times during their most recent west coast touring jaunt. two februaries ago, we took a weekend to catch them in both seattle and portland, and both shows were great, though at the time i lamented the fact that all wilco shows are more or less the same. of course, "the same" should be read "awesome", but i doubted the necessity of seeing back-to-back shows ever again. this time, though, one show was within a short driving distance of our friend john's apartment in portland and the other was a short distance from my own apartment, in spokane, and was taking place almost on my and lindsey's 3 year anniversary, at the spot where we'd met for the first time. it seemed imperative to go to both.
 |
| lindsey at the hult center. |
after the show, i'd assumed that after having been awake for a million hours and driven almost 9 of them, we'd just head back to portland and sleep. instead, (fortunately, as it turned out ) we got to meet up with john and his friend, and went in search of food and drink in post-midnight eugene. this led us to an excellent pizza/beer joint called (i think) cosmic pizza and reheated vegetarian slices paired with an excellent vanilla stout. from there, things became a bit of a haze featuring organic american spirits and a rather enthusiastic eugenean (?) who kept insisting that "the spirit of the 1890s is ALIVE!" and solicited smooches from all four of us (lindsey included) before disappearing into her apartment building.
 |
| a pizza place with sriracha! |
we woke up the next morning shortly after sunrise, but i was feeling pretty good. actual, legitimate sunrise in portland is such a rare thing that it's rather inspiring to experience. as such, i shook off my lethargy, forced lindsey to make me breakfast (women are for cooking!) and then settled in to work a bit on job applications and watch the city wake up.
it wasn't long before john woke up and gifted us with a second breakfast, and then we were off to bridal veil falls for a little (read: lot) of hiking.
 |
| lindsey being dwarfed by bridal veil falls. |
as might be expected, though, the lure of a entire day in which there was no school-related work to be done tempted us into a bit of laziness and we'd gotten on the road a lot later than we'd originally planned. as a result, we were only about two-thirds of the way to devil's rest before the sun began to go down in earnest. it became obvious we weren't going to make it up and back before dark, and hiking long distances over a dramatic elevation change in the dark sort of takes a trip out of "fun day hike" territory and straight into "possible survival scenario" territory. so we decided to turn around. and then we decided to run.
 |
| lindsey and becca in front of another waterfall. |
upon our re-arrival in portland, we settled in for a typical john-style repast, featuring much more home-cooked food than could have been eaten by eight people, and store-bought vegan chicken wings from a portland restaurant called fire on the mountain that were quite possibly the best thing i have ever eaten in my entire life. for serious.
i don't remember much of the rest of that night, because the lack of sleep from the previous few days caught up with me in a huge way after dinner. i vaguely remember passing out (quite literally) from sleepiness shortly after the huge meal, and waking up briefly later that evening to say goodnight to everyone before dropping off again.
 |
| lindsey, john, and becca at a lookout point above bridal veil falls. |
after an interlude of about 16 hours of frenetic work and worry and such, we left just before dinnertime on monday to get to spokane in time to eat and catch the second show. our dinner-location of choice was the fascinating (if you're an urban-spaces geek like me) steam plant grill in spokane, which had severely jacked up its prices since our last visit but still offered great food and an excellent vanilla bourbon stout. for the show proper, we were once again in the second row, which i know have found makes the show much easier to see, but less easy to hear. we had john stiratt's bass in our faces the entire night (not necessarily a bad thing), and the setlist was a lot more varied, and there was a seven-song encore.
by the end of the trip, i'd spent a little more time, money, and energy than i'd really planned for, but it was all worth it. after this, i'll likely be chaining myself to my writing desk for good until this dissertation is finished, so it was a nice send-off to freedom, and if wilco keeps up their habit of visiting the pacific northwest only once every two years, the memories will definitely make the wait for the next go-round more bearable.
Jan 31, 2012
mega(fuck)upload (of problems)
so this post stems from my reading this article, in which it is revealed that megaupload's legitimate (and illegitimate) user files are soon to be deleted. apparently the department of justice has already (in a frighteningly efficient move for our government) retrieved all the evidence it wants to use against megaupload's CEO/other people and so the rest is just going to be flushed.
as the story goes, this data is ultimately going to be deleted because megaupload has (presumably) megabandwidth bills, and with its assets frozen after the recent government takedown, it's unable to pay those bills any longer. makes sense, in a way: why should the megaupload's internet hosts continue to support their massive bandwidth if megaupload can't make their payments?
the subtext to this whole deal, of course, is that all of those files constitute evidence in the coming case between megaupload and the government, and it's a bit problematic that nobody's stepping in and saying "no, you can't just flush gigabytes of files down the drain in the middle of a case". in fact, one could make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed constitutes a sort-of obstruction of justice on the part of the government. you could even make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed is not terribly unlike burning down an entire neighborhood because you know there's a criminal in one house: from this perspective, those files are the owners' property, and since a lot of people store legit files on megaupload, their hard drive backups, photos of their wedding, etc. are being destroyed indirectly by the government despite the fact that they themselves did nothing wrong.
as i see it, there are big gaping problems with both of these arguments, but at the same time the government's lack of interest in acknowledging that not every single person even marginally associated with megaupload is a criminal is definitely troubling. it is a bit like, as one internet commenter put it, renting a garage on a storage company lot, and then finding out one day that your garage had been torched overnight because the owner of the establishment was laundering money through the business. maybe all you kept in that garage was some old furniture. maybe you had no idea the owner was a criminal. but now your shit's gone, and there doesn't really seem to be any recourse.
maybe this is another one of those new internet-changes-the-way-the-world-works things. after all, if the government's going to make a habit of shutting down online storage sites, the effect that those shutdowns have on the millions of people that use them is going to be immense. and probably something that, legally, the government is allowed to just totally overlook. imagine, if i can be hyperbolic for a moment, a situation in which the government suddenly decides "well, fuck, there sure is a lot of child porn being distributed over facebook. better shut 'er down!" and boom, out go the lights. it's an extreme example to be sure, but two assumptions that underlie it are, i believe, visible in the megaupload case as well: 1) that the "one bad egg ruins it for everybody" approach is justified in cases like these and 2) that it's okay to not be interested in hashing out exactly what "due process" might constitute in terms of determining guilt/potential punishment.
i'm absolutely certain that megaupload's CEO is guilty of whatever our government says he's guilty of, and i'm absolutely certain that the majority of users of megaupload used it to traffic in illegal content. but our law says you have to prove those things in court rather than just assuming that they're true and then acting according, and even if you do prove them, not every megaupload user was "in on it". once again, we've got prominent government offices acting just like they were regarding SOPA and PIPA: like old white guys who are too rich and too busy to bother learning about this newfangled technology, and the result is that they're reacting like megaupload was a physical business, located in a physical building, dealing in physical goods (read: one copy only) with physical customers. and that's just not the case.
but all the blabber isn't really what worries me. what really worries me is this sudden desire to pigeonhole all online storage as bad and infringing. because a lot of the stuff being shared on these sites is legal, and has been posted with the understanding that it will likely be there for awhile. not forever, of course, but take for example a music site called the midnight cafe. i've been following this site for years, as it generally posts a new live music recording every single day (or at least a few times a week) from a variety of different artists. these "bootlegs" are legal recordings, uploaded on the author's own time, just so that they can be freely available for anyone who wants easy access to them. recently, the site posted this, and then shortly after, this. there are a lot of music projects like this out there. another example is the phish spreadsheet, which is the work of one guy who spent a major chunk of his life tracking, tagging, and uploading every single phish show ever recorded into one well-organized spreadsheet (and again these are free, legal recordings) just improve ease of access and to provide a digital archive that could, in theory, last for damn near ever. now i know that most people aren't too keen on phish, but if you know anything about music, you know that they are mostly known for their live performances. this spreadsheet project is in a sense the culmination of thirty years' worth of taping and trading (nowadays done online and through torrents, but originally done for years and years using the mail and actual tapes), and yet if the site that hosts all of these shows is the next to go down, then it's all gone.
oh, not permanently, of course, as i'm sure there are backups of these sorts of things. but what's lost is the worldwide access to the music. i don't much care if someone's birthday photos are going to be lost when megaupload is purged. if you don't backup your personal files locally that's your own fault, as far as i'm concerned. but these sites are used as much more than a backup service for individuals. they're also the hubs of legal, vital online archives and similar communities. and, sure, if one site shuts down, another will always rise to fill its place, but how many times are people going to want to bother uploading 2000 individual phish shows if their hosting site gets taken down every six months?
i'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, but it's definitely more nuanced than the current department of justice/megaupload response looks to be.
as the story goes, this data is ultimately going to be deleted because megaupload has (presumably) megabandwidth bills, and with its assets frozen after the recent government takedown, it's unable to pay those bills any longer. makes sense, in a way: why should the megaupload's internet hosts continue to support their massive bandwidth if megaupload can't make their payments?
the subtext to this whole deal, of course, is that all of those files constitute evidence in the coming case between megaupload and the government, and it's a bit problematic that nobody's stepping in and saying "no, you can't just flush gigabytes of files down the drain in the middle of a case". in fact, one could make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed constitutes a sort-of obstruction of justice on the part of the government. you could even make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed is not terribly unlike burning down an entire neighborhood because you know there's a criminal in one house: from this perspective, those files are the owners' property, and since a lot of people store legit files on megaupload, their hard drive backups, photos of their wedding, etc. are being destroyed indirectly by the government despite the fact that they themselves did nothing wrong.
as i see it, there are big gaping problems with both of these arguments, but at the same time the government's lack of interest in acknowledging that not every single person even marginally associated with megaupload is a criminal is definitely troubling. it is a bit like, as one internet commenter put it, renting a garage on a storage company lot, and then finding out one day that your garage had been torched overnight because the owner of the establishment was laundering money through the business. maybe all you kept in that garage was some old furniture. maybe you had no idea the owner was a criminal. but now your shit's gone, and there doesn't really seem to be any recourse.
maybe this is another one of those new internet-changes-the-way-the-world-works things. after all, if the government's going to make a habit of shutting down online storage sites, the effect that those shutdowns have on the millions of people that use them is going to be immense. and probably something that, legally, the government is allowed to just totally overlook. imagine, if i can be hyperbolic for a moment, a situation in which the government suddenly decides "well, fuck, there sure is a lot of child porn being distributed over facebook. better shut 'er down!" and boom, out go the lights. it's an extreme example to be sure, but two assumptions that underlie it are, i believe, visible in the megaupload case as well: 1) that the "one bad egg ruins it for everybody" approach is justified in cases like these and 2) that it's okay to not be interested in hashing out exactly what "due process" might constitute in terms of determining guilt/potential punishment.
i'm absolutely certain that megaupload's CEO is guilty of whatever our government says he's guilty of, and i'm absolutely certain that the majority of users of megaupload used it to traffic in illegal content. but our law says you have to prove those things in court rather than just assuming that they're true and then acting according, and even if you do prove them, not every megaupload user was "in on it". once again, we've got prominent government offices acting just like they were regarding SOPA and PIPA: like old white guys who are too rich and too busy to bother learning about this newfangled technology, and the result is that they're reacting like megaupload was a physical business, located in a physical building, dealing in physical goods (read: one copy only) with physical customers. and that's just not the case.
but all the blabber isn't really what worries me. what really worries me is this sudden desire to pigeonhole all online storage as bad and infringing. because a lot of the stuff being shared on these sites is legal, and has been posted with the understanding that it will likely be there for awhile. not forever, of course, but take for example a music site called the midnight cafe. i've been following this site for years, as it generally posts a new live music recording every single day (or at least a few times a week) from a variety of different artists. these "bootlegs" are legal recordings, uploaded on the author's own time, just so that they can be freely available for anyone who wants easy access to them. recently, the site posted this, and then shortly after, this. there are a lot of music projects like this out there. another example is the phish spreadsheet, which is the work of one guy who spent a major chunk of his life tracking, tagging, and uploading every single phish show ever recorded into one well-organized spreadsheet (and again these are free, legal recordings) just improve ease of access and to provide a digital archive that could, in theory, last for damn near ever. now i know that most people aren't too keen on phish, but if you know anything about music, you know that they are mostly known for their live performances. this spreadsheet project is in a sense the culmination of thirty years' worth of taping and trading (nowadays done online and through torrents, but originally done for years and years using the mail and actual tapes), and yet if the site that hosts all of these shows is the next to go down, then it's all gone.
oh, not permanently, of course, as i'm sure there are backups of these sorts of things. but what's lost is the worldwide access to the music. i don't much care if someone's birthday photos are going to be lost when megaupload is purged. if you don't backup your personal files locally that's your own fault, as far as i'm concerned. but these sites are used as much more than a backup service for individuals. they're also the hubs of legal, vital online archives and similar communities. and, sure, if one site shuts down, another will always rise to fill its place, but how many times are people going to want to bother uploading 2000 individual phish shows if their hosting site gets taken down every six months?
i'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, but it's definitely more nuanced than the current department of justice/megaupload response looks to be.
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