autocratic for the people.

All Lies Lead to the Truth.

Kate and I have been engaged in a highly scientific, highly dangerous endeavor over the last few months, and we are finally prepared to share the result:

The X-Files started to suck in the seventh season.

I know! We were surprised too. Turns out, though, the sixth season is quite strong – it may actually be the best one.

Anyway, since we've done the legwork, we reasoned we should provide a brief rundown of each season, at least up to the seventh. (We're now at the beginning of season 8, and are just about to pack it in – Robert Patrick has landed, and it's getting tough to watch.) These summaries are largely useless if you've never seen the show, but hopefully there are bits and pieces that'll sound familiar to casual viewers.

1. The first season is, as you'd expect, a bit rough. Duchovny's a terrible, terrible actor, and the special effects are doubtful at best. But despite a few truly awful episodes (Space, about the face on Mars, is a particular hoot), there are also quite a few that clearly telegraph the series' potential (Ice, a beautifully executed riff on John Carpenter's "The Thing"; Darkness Falls, my favorite from the season, about a lumber camp in the Pacific Northwest; and The Erlenmeyer Flask, the season finale, which is fantastic, and as good as anything the show produces later on). On the whole, it's an interesting season – and more importantly, it establishes that this show is worth watching in the proper sequential order, because seeing the production values evolve is just as interesting as watching the mythology unfold.
   
   
2. I'd like to say the second season is really where the show took off, but it isn't. Season two feels a bit softer and more forgiving than season one, I believe because Gillian Anderson's real-life pregnancy forced the touchy-feely Duane Barry / Ascension / One Breath arc towards the beginning of the season. Fortunately, the show gets is gross-out factor back after that, and rounds out the season very strongly. The best were Dod Kalm, which follows Mulder and Scully onto a ghost ship; Irresistible, the only episode that really freaked Kate out; and the two-parter Colony / End Game, which both gives the special effects team a run for their money, and finally demonstrates that the show is capable of complex, intertwined narratives. The season ender is Anasazi, a great standalone episode that also makes a pretty effective cliffhanger.
   
   
3. The third season is really where the show took off, consistently turning out compelling stories and good effects. Laying aside the labored opener The Blessing Way, the season's second episode, Paper Clip, adds depth to the show's mythology and finally evokes the proper sense of scale – that is, that Mulder and Scully are really facing a massive, far-reaching conspiracy. Continuing through the season, there are two of the better two-parters in the show's entire run: Nisei / 731, which largely concern a train car; and Piper Maru / Apocrypha, which introduce the black oil. There are also quite a few excellent self-contained episodes: Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, which apparently TV Guide called one of the greatest episodes in TV history; Pusher, about a particularly hard-to-catch fugitive; Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space', which needs no further introduction; and the surprisingly engrossing, largely overlooked Wetwired. In fact, the only real stinker is Teso Dos Bichos, which is about, uh, cats. The third season concludes with Talitha Cumi, which introduces Jeremiah Smith. It isn't up to the level of the season's prior two-parters, but it's not bad.
   
   
4. Fourth season. The show's on-stride. The excellent opening episode Herrenvolk provides a comprehensive setup for the feature film, which strangely doesn't occur until after the fifth season. Perhaps that's why so little happens with the mythology in the interim. Anyway, after that one comes Home, a great, twisted episode that's ridiculously violent for television (and was subsequently pulled from syndication for three years); The Field Where I Died, perhaps the show's best overall effort at a character episode; El Mundo Gira, the chupacabra episode, which I actually like quite a lot upon repeat viewing; and the disgusting yet completely awesome Sanguinarium and Leonard Betts. (You get the feeling the effects department hired a few new people for this season.) The mythology episodes are strong as well, in particular Kate's favorite Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man, but also the two-parter Tempus Fugit / Max, which concerns a plane crash. The season then takes a bit of a dip for the last three or four episodes, but the finale Gethsemane ekes out a respectable cliffhanger. On the whole, this season is one of the better ones.
   
   
5. The fifth starts to go a little bit overboard with the effects. You get the feeling that a bunch of gimmicky scripts had accrued, and the time had come to clear them out. How else to explain the black-and-white Postmodern Prometheus, the Predator-esque Detour, or the utterly terrible Steven King collaboration Chinga? (Or, for that matter, the wretched William Gibson-penned Kill Switch?) But if things turn a bit, shall we say, commercially-influenced for a bit, they do get better towards the middle of the season. The two-parter Patient X / The Red and the Black gets the mythology back on track, and Bad Blood brings some much-needed humor back to the show. The season rounds out pretty well with the excellent, excellent Travelers (which nevertheless contains my least-favorite effects shot from the show's entire run), the non-supernatural but still solid Pine Bluff Variant, and the telemarketing-inspired Folie a Deux. The season finale, The End, introduces the chess master Gibson Praise and generally sets things up for the feature film.
   
   
6. The sixth season. This is really the best season. No kidding. Although it starts off with a complex, plot-heavy thump of an episode (The Beginning) that's responsible for picking up the movie's dropped ball, it then proceeds to crank out two of the show's best standalone episodes: Drive, about a man who can't stop driving west; and Triangle, about the Queen Anne, which incidentally contains a total of four camera shots. The first two-parter, Dreamland / Dreamland II, is pretty clichéd, but the following episodes Rain King and How the Ghosts Stole Christmas make up for it. The sixth season's second two-parter was, to our complete surprise, the best two-parter we've seen: Two Fathers / One Son, regarding both the Smoking Man and the purpose of all the abductions, is tightly paced, surprising, and really brings the show's mythology back after it was largely ignored for the season's first half. The season from there has its rough spots (Agua Mala, Alpha, Trevor, and The Unnatural are all terrible), but it also sports a number of excellent monster-of-the-week episodes: Arcadia, wherein Mulder and Scully investigate a gated community; Monday, an interpretation of "Groundhog Day"; and Three of a Kind, a Lone Gunmen episode set in Las Vegas. And the season finale (Biogenesis) brings the season to such a well-thought-out, grand close that it's obvious the show should've signed off at this point. The last shot of this episode really nails what the X-Files has always been about, and it places all of the main characters where they want to be. If you're renting the DVDs, just stop here and marvel at what a great show it was.
   
   
7. The seventh season is crap. Don't watch it. Well, watch the third episode (Hungry, which tells a story from the monster's point of view) and the twelfth (X-Cops, an episode shot as if from the COPS TV show), but no others. We're on the 20th of 22 episodes for this season, we haven't enjoyed it, and – jesus, it's like they fired everybody and hired some chimps.
   

posted by avixe @ 9:37 PM 1 comments

Ideology.

Have you noticed that, when TV news anchors say the phrase "ideology of hate", they pronounce the word "eye-dee-ology", as if to stress the 'idea' homophone of the word, but when they say the phrase, "extremist ideology," the pronounce the word "id-ee-ology," as if to stress the 'idiot' homophone? I've been paying attention to this over the last few weeks, and it seems pretty consistent.

Just an observation.

posted by avixe @ 9:39 PM 0 comments

The Discoverability is Gone.

I complained awhile back that the Office 2007 user interface overhaul was a step backwards, because it throws out users' prior knowledge of Office and will bury tech support hotlines in questions until expensive retraining is performed.

Well, it seems Microsoft has figured that out as well – their Office UI team representative / whipping boy Jensen Harris has lately noted as much. But their solution to this problem is so over-the-top stupid that I'm surprised it didn't affect the company's stock price.

They made a one-page, printable cheat sheet explaining how to use the new Office UI, which they expect people to read first, and then stick up on their cubicle wall for further reference. No kidding. So the UI team's response to the complaint "no one can figure out this crap UI" boils down to "well, read the manual first."

It should not surprise you to hear that mountains of empirical data indicate that nobody reads manuals. As a result, most interaction designers learn early on that discoverability – the ability of users to figure out how to interact with a program – is an absolutely critical component of a successful UI. (In fact, dropdown menu bars, absent from this new UI, are generally considered the single most important method for promoting discoverability.) The Office UI team has completely deluded itself if it thinks anyone is going to read this cheat sheet, or for that matter if it thinks users are even going to get it from their IT departments.

To reiterate, these guys are clowns.

posted by avixe @ 10:05 PM 0 comments

Free Culture.

Lessig's Free Culture argues powerfully that our lawmakers' susceptibility to powerful lobbying has ended the United States' tradition of passing copyrighted works into the public domain, and that perpetual extensions of the copyright term will ultimately allow big media to "assure that all [culture] there is is what is theirs." It's a persuasively argued book, filled with rich, apt metaphors and fascinating discussions of the origination and intended purpose of copyright (as it originally pertained: to book publishing, for commercial purposes, in a highly competitive market).

An excerpt:

... Copyright's duration has increased dramatically – tripled in the past thirty years. And copyright's scope has increased as well – from regulating only publishers to now regulating just about everyone. And copyright's reach has changed, as every action [on the Internet] becomes a copy and is hence presumptively regulated. And as technologists find better ways to control the use of content, and as copyright is increasingly enforced through technology, copyright's force changes, too. Misuse is easier to find and easier to control. This regulation of the creative process, which began as a tiny regulation governing a tiny part of the market for creative work, has become the single most important regulator of creativity there is. It is a massive expansion in the scope of the government's control over innovation and creativity; it would be totally unrecognizable to those who gave birth to copyright's control.

The book also regularly addresses the issue of online music sharing, which has raged since Napster in 1999 and is arguably responsible for the current mutated state of fair use:

... When the other side says, "File sharing is just like walking into a Tower Records and taking a CD off the shelf and walking out with it," that's true, at least in part. If, after Lyle Lovett (finally) releases a new album, rather than buying it, I go to Kazaa and find a free copy to take, that is very much like stealing a copy from Tower.

But it is not quite stealing from Tower. After all, when I take a CD from Tower Records, Tower has one less CD to sell. And when I take a CD from Tower Records, I get a bit of plastic and a cover, and something to show on my shelves. (And, while we're at it, we could also note that when I take a CD from Tower Records, the maximum fine that might be imposed on me, under California law, at least, is $1,000. According to the RIAA, by contrast, if I download a ten-song CD, I'm liable for $1,500,000 in damages.)

The point is not that it is as neither side describes. The point is that it is both – both as the RIAA describes it and as Kazaa describes it. It is a chimera. And rather than simply denying what the other side asserts, we need to begin to think about how we should respond to this chimera. What rules should govern it?

In the end, Lessig describes the rules that should govern it. He also describes how he attempted to get the (single) rule introduced to Congress, but had it crushed by Jack Valenti and media lobbies despite its explicit support for their business models. Lessig also beautifully recounts a clearly painful experience he had in 2002 when arguing at the Supreme Court that Congress' regular extensions of copyright's term is unconstitutional. (And it is very clear, if you look at the Constitution, that it is.) In the end, this is a hugely important book, and anyone who feels that learning from history's mistakes, opposing subjugation of the First Amendment, or reclaiming what democracy used to be needs to read it.

Which makes it all the more fortunate that, if you don't want to purchase a copy, you can just download it for free instead. For Lessig is also the author of the Creative Commons license.

posted by avixe @ 9:49 PM 1 comments