Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Writing this post makes me nervous, because the subject matter is mostly personal, and I rarely write about personal matters on this site (or anywhere else, for that matter). Still, what I intend to write passes my standard litmus test. Anything I put on this site should be something I’d feel comfortable seeing reproduced in two locations:

1. A billboard in Times Square.
2. My boss’s living room.

Oh, what the hell, let’s disclose something without the safety net of sarcasm, critical pretensions, or academic distance. Honestly, it’s a small thing, but it’s a thing I’d rather write down than not.

Last Saturday night, my friends and I were engaged in a game of Ticket to Ride. Like all good games, the rules are straightforward and the execution is fun. The game board is a map of the United States criss-crossed with candy-colored train routes. The goal is to control as many of these routes as possible by the time the game ends. Each player has a pile of little plastic train tokens, and most of the action consists of players placing their tokens along routes to claim them. That’s the most relevant bit here, the tiny little tokens being placed on tiny little sections of the board.

The other relevant bit is my tremor, which, I am shocked to realize after perusing my archives, I have never mentioned. It’s fairly common in people with cerebral palsy. If you’re picturing uncontrollable shaking or an inability to cease moving, you’ve got it wrong. It only activates when I’m doing something with my hands (as opposed to the kinds of tremors you’d see in Parkinson’s disease, which occur at rest). It’s generally so slight as to be a non-issue, but it gets worse when I’m nervous, or excited, or thinking about my tremor, or because it’s Tuesday.

In neuroscience classes, students learn that the nervous system is essentially probabilistic and stochastic (a slight retreat into the comfort of academic distance, so sue me). Factions of neurons are constantly arguing with each other over important issues like, say, whether you should reach for that glass of water, or maybe have an orgasm. The faction that argues loudest and most efficiently gets its way, kind of like the U.S. Senate, though to my knowledge no piece of legislation has ever led to an orgasm. The thing to keep in mind is that just because one faction has won, that doesn’t mean all the other factions go quiet. In fact, some neurons will pipe up spontaneously and for no good reason, kind of like Michele Bachmann. A tremor is really just a visible manifestation of all this underlying chaos. Most of my neurons might be saying, “Carry this brimming cup of scalding hot tea across the room, and let’s not spill it, shall we?” but there are still a few clumps of neurons saying, “Also, it would be good to move your hand a little left, a little right, a little down, and a little up. All at once. And while we’re at it, climate change is tyranny.” Being nervous or excited (or Tuesday) makes a tremor worse because these states increase the general level of activity in the nervous system, making it harder to suppress these unwanted signals. And this is why Michele Bachmann should be given massive doses of horse tranquilizer. But I digress.

Let’s return to Ticket to Ride. I’m having a lot of fun playing the game, but I’m also having a lot of trouble placing the tiny little trains on the tiny little routes. Pinching the train lightly enough to lower it into a precise spot is proving extremely difficult. I’m well accustomed to my tremor and the dash of unpredictability it adds to tasks like this, but even by my standards this is weird, even unsettling. My friends are noticing, but I’m not sure how to address the situation, or even if I should. I’ve played this game before and it wasn’t a problem then, so why now? Is this just a natural byproduct of getting older? Is it a sign of things to come? A harbinger of the inevitable betrayal by the body? The first stealthy, subtle entreaties of frailty and age?

No. It turns out that I had to take a crap. Really badly. An hour after the game ended I was in the bathroom doing what I really hate to do in friends’ bathrooms. Without going into the kind of detail I’d be sure to regret later, let’s just say that the experience was unusually urgent. My best guess is that my enteric nervous system was already stressing out during the game, which elevated my tremor.

So to the list of excited, nervous, and Tuesday, we can now confidently add, “need to crap.” At first I thought I was crazy to believe that gastrointestinal distress could have worsened my hand tremor, but it’s really not so strange. Peoples’ bodies do all sorts of weird stuff when in that unfortunate situation; they sweat, get a chill, and, come to think of it, even occasionally get the shakes. The truth is that the human body is a bundle of strange chaos, and my hand tremor, slight as it may be, helps me remember that.

Facebook recently surpassed 500 million users. Exactly what percentage of that number really “use” Facebook on a daily or even weekly basis is unknown, but it’s an impressive feat any way you slice it, especially for a site that started as one man’s personal burn book in 2003. I’ve always been wary of Facebook, as I am wary of any website that uses the sentence “Tell me everything about yourself!” as a business model. As Facebook has grown—or exploded, really—over the last seven years, so has my unease. It’s a gut feeling, a free-floating discomfort that’s hard to put into words, though I have often tried.

At first the words were, I don’t like that Facebook is centralizing all things “social” on the internet. I correspond with friends, get invited to parties, receive reminders from my book club, look at photo albums, and experience a million other tiny social interactions, all through Facebook’s tidy little pages. That we would so willingly allow our social interactions to be centralized, commoditized, and controlled seems like something out of Orwell, or better, Huxley, as we unwittingly sacrifice freedom so that we can amuse ourselves to death. Isn’t it unsettling that a single company could have so much control over such an important aspect of our lives?

Well, not really. Sure, Facebook controls the social (Microsoft must be kicking itself), but NSTAR controls my electricity and gas. A couple of food conglomerates produce most of the chicken I’ll ever eat. An organization I can’t even name provides me with clean, fluorinated water. I get my water from them, and I don’t even know who they are. All sorts of important, even essential, things are run through centralized agencies, be they private companies or federal organizations. Facebook is just a new kind of utility, and while your social life might take a slight ding without an account, you certainly don’t need one to have a life.

Since there’s nothing wrong with Facebook centralizing the social, my unease had to take a new form. I don’t like that Facebook is rapidly spreading its tendrils across the internet, integrating itself with every website and web service I encounter. On the surface of it, that’s scary, but only because I’m using a word like tendrils. The spread of Facebook’s ubiquitous “Like” buttons really represents two things. First, this is just another example of Facebook trying to centralize all social activity on the web, which we’ve now established is not that big a deal. Second, and more importantly, I am for all intents and purposes eternally signed in to Facebook, even when I’m nowhere near Facebook.com. My unease stems from the idea that my Facebook identity—which is my real identity, let’s remember—now persists across spaces where I would have previously been anonymous. So it’s the loss of anonymity that bothers me.

But why should it? Internet anonymity exists (or perhaps, existed) because the internet is so young. In the beginning, there were few persistent databases, no rules, and identity was malleable. You could pack up your digital identity and vanish without a trace, and, if you so chose, you could come back as someone else entirely. The power to remake yourself however you saw fit was thrilling, intoxicating, and wondrous, but anonymity isn’t without its drawbacks and dangers. For that matter, why should I assume that I have any right to anonymity in the first place? No less than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently stated that if you want to participate in society, you can’t do so anonymously. As the internet becomes essential to our society, the ability to remain anonymous on it becomes increasingly difficult, and even counterproductive. Facebook is just the most visible manifestation of this inevitable transition.

So if I’m at peace with Facebook’s utilitarian control of my social life and the inevitable destruction of anonymity on the web, why the anxiety? I suppose it boils down to this. Facebook’s users volunteer an absolutely insane amount of information about themselves. In an average profile you might encounter: my name, my address, my phone number, my IM, my mother, my father, my siblings, my school, my college, my employer, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, what I’m watching, what I’m reading, what I like, what I hate, where I was, where I am, where I’m going, who I’m dating, how I’m voting, and photographic evidence to corroborate any and all of this.

Half a billion people now have access to a system that can chronicle their lives in the most minute detail, the sort of living timeline that used to be the privilege of royalty, historical giants, and madmen. Twenty years from now I might be able to scroll back through Facebook and see a snapshot of who I was at this moment, captured not just in photographs, but in things I wrote, thoughts I shared, and conversations I had. On the one hand, it’s a modern miracle.

On the other hand, it’s a stalker’s dream, or put another way, a nightmare. What bothers me most about Facebook is that millions of people are offering up an unprecedented volume of deeply personal data to a private company with absolutely no oversight. Facebook can do whatever it wants with this data. It has no mandate to product your privacy, and clearly does not care to. Innumerable details of my life in the hands of a private corporation? How is that not a nightmare?

What bothers me second-most about Facebook is the stultifying sameness of it all. I suppose this isn’t a problem for most people, but let me provide an example. This summer, eight of my closest friends and I took a trip up to Maine. It was a wonderful weekend. Magical, even. I have pictures to prove it, but I don’t want to put them on Facebook. It’s not that there’s anything on the camera that I wouldn’t want made public, on the contrary, the weekend was remarkably wholesome (almost Mormon, excepting the Lovecraft and all the drinking). Putting these images on Facebook simply would not do them justice. That wasn’t just another weekend, and I can’t stand to see it become just another album.

My fear of Facebook, then, is that we’ll put all of ourselves into it, and get a mere fraction of that back.

Muse, one of my favorite bands, has a new single out on the Twilight: Eclipse soundtrack. I’m sure you can imagine my conflict here. I bit the bullet and gave the song a listen, and now I can only assume that Muse set out to mock fans of Twilight, parody themselves, or both. The title of the song is “Neutron Star Collision (Love is Forever)”. I get the feeling that the parenthetical was added purely for clarification, as the phrase “neutron star collision” doesn’t exactly scream “love song”. Oh sure, it does to me, but then, my life is all gaussians and null hypotheses, and I’m waiting for your points of data to make a beautiful line, baby. I’m not some teenage girl heading to the movies after the weekly outing to Claire’s.

The opening lyric is:

I was searching
You were on a mission
And our hearts combined like
A neutron star collision.

That’s right, baby, our love is a cosmic cataclysm, a destructive event so powerful that it could atomize Earth and its entire solar system in less time than it takes you to begin to blink. I love you, too.

“Neutron Star Collision” is short for a Muse song but contains most of their usual tricks. Overwrought lyrics made palatable through Matthew Bellamy’s unique vocals? Check. Quick shifts from slow and soft to fast and loud? Check. Piano outro? Check. The song itself is a good example of a band going through the motions, the one saving grace being that the band is Muse.

Music criticism isn’t really something I do, so I thought I’d share something that my incredibly talented friends created off the cuff. This originally transpired on Facebook, but I don’t see why Mark Zuckerberg should be allowed to centralize all of the internet’s content, no matter how many of my former classmates end up portraying his life or how melodramatic they make the trailer. But I digress.

THE MIDWESTER: There’s a Twilight convention in Boston? As a beautiful and emotionally abusive Dracula, I really should have been informed.

THE SOUTHERNER: But I’m sooooooo plain and clumsy and bad and vague! How could you ever love someone like meeeeeee? I need you to validate my existence.

THE MIDWESTER: No! I’m too dangerous! Wait here while I abandon you.

THE SOUTHERNER: I am saddened and plagued with guilt, for only I am to blame for your horrible behavior towards me. It makes me want you more.

THE BREWER: SOUTHERNER, MIDWESTER is dangerous for a reason that I will not specify. My family all distrust him.

THE TALL ONE: Do I feel a sudden desire to turn into an under-age wolf with great pecs? For some reason, I am feeling that urge!

THE SOUTHERNER: That’s funny, all I feel is shame and an urge to do whatever men tell me to do.

THE BREWER: Isn’t that what you felt before MIDWESTER was a teenage Dracula made of diamonds?

THE MIDWESTER: Hey I just got back from the Dracula convention and the great Obamapire gave me permission to draculate you, SOUTHERNER. PS my skin is sparkling because of beauty.

THE SOUTHERNER: I am conflicted. Like, super conflicted, you guys. But MIDWESTER told me to get draculated, so that seems like a good idea, I guess. Oh, woe is me, will I ever break out of this ugly duckling stage and embrace the true me, the glistening Swan unashamed of this shame and doubt and conflict? So, yeah, go ahead and undead me or whatever. I probably deserve it.

The only correct reactions to a screening of The Last Airbender are anger, disgust, and anguish. It is atrocious in the truest sense of the word, in that it is an absolute atrocity. Honestly, I would prefer to express my feelings about this film as a single, echoing scream of rage not unlike this one. The ability to turn back time would also be handy here, but since neither of these are realistic options, I’ll settle for a long string of words that accomplishes the same effect.

In fact, my already impressive stable of words, which I keep groomed like a herd of prize stallions for use in exactly these kinds of situations, is inadequate to the task. I find myself expanding the English language to properly encompass the unremitting catastrophe that is M. Night Shyamalan’s latest work, inventing words like omnihorrific and vomitacious and spectacuturd. My favorite of these new words is nontage. I believe this is a truly new word, as I can’t even find it in the Urban Dictionary. Formally defined, a nontage is a montage in which nothing happens. Airbender is full of these. In one scene, we see Aang and Katara practicing Tai Chi by a river. This is in a world where mastery of martial arts gives some individuals the ability to manipulate the four elements. We see the martial arts and we’re waiting for the payoff, the nifty special effect. Maybe a floating orb of water, or a column of the stuff snaking out of the nearby lake. We wait. We know that Aang is performing these movements specifically to learn the art of waterbending. It’s important. Moreover, it’s a perfectly good excuse to give us some Hollywood magic, a moment of fantasy made real by skilled filmmakers. We wait for that moment, but the moment never comes. They’re just moving around by the river in silence as the camera sweeps by, contributing nothing to the story. A perfect nontage.

So many things went wrong with this movie that it’s hard to know where to begin. The most galling thing about Airbender is that it’s based on really great source material. The series, which aired on Nickelodeon under the title, Avatar: The Last Airbender, is an absolutely terrific TV show, marked by vivid art direction, sharp writing, complex, lovable characters, and an attention to detail that rewards the audience and enriches the entire experience. The contrast between the excellence of the TV series and the willful incompetence of the film is unbelievable.

The picture I’m using to head this post is taken from “The Ember Island Players,” one of the final episodes of the series. It originally aired just before the huge series finale, and it functioned as a kind of recap of the entire show. Our heroes opt to take a break from their nerve-wracking preparations for the war against the Fire Lord to catch a show. The show happens to be a retelling of their exploits courtesy of a Fire Nation touring company. The production is full of exaggerations and inaccuracies, and it acts as a showcase for the producers to mock themselves. It’s also a creative, entertaining way to revisit the series’s major plot points for those who might have missed them. But even amidst this outlandish self-parody, the writers find time for some character development. Prince Zuko, recently converted into a good guy, is forced to watch every bad decision he’s made throughout the series replayed for laughs. His humiliation is matched only by his personal guilt over his actions.

Avatar is ostensibly geared toward children and therefore a comedy first, but one that’s not afraid to treat the audience with respect and take itself seriously where the story warrants it (in this respect, it has a lot in common with M*A*S*H*, the celebrated comedy about the Korean War). If you want to see the series at its funniest, you can go here and watch “Avatar Day”. This episode starts out, as many do, with our heroes running from a surprise attack by a group of Fire Nation mercenaries. Sokka loses his beloved boomerang in the scuffle, and the B plot in the episode concerns his attempts to find a new “thing” to define him. Ponytail? Torch? Pipe? Monocle? Nothing feels right. In the episode’s action-packed climax, the mercenaries return, and in the ensuing fight Sokka’s boomerang tumbles out of a satchel and into his hands. “Boomerang!” he cries, overjoyed, “You do always come back!” Ladies and gentleman, that is a long walk for a punchline. It’s not every show that would have the patience, confidence, or outright skill to execute a joke with a twenty minute setup.

As a TV show, Avatar never failed to strike a perfect balance between emotional weight and comic levity. Things never got trite. When Aang starts having too much fun, the writers deftly shift the tone back to the dramatic with a simple, stark reminder of the ongoing war. In retrospect, the jokes of a moment ago become a metaphor for Aang’s naivety and his unwillingness to accept the responsibilities of the Avatar. We, as the audience, feel his guilt, because weren’t we just laughing at his antics? Likewise, the writers always knew when to defuse the emotional torment and high drama with a well-timed joke or self-aware comment.

My point here is that Avatar: The Last Airbender was a great TV show, easily the finest American cartoon ever made. You’d be hard pressed to find a single bad episode in the entire series (spoiler alert: it’s “The Great Divide”, from the first season). Airing on a network that also seemed determined to milk the inane SpongeBob Squarepants for all it wasn’t worth, Avatar gave me hope for the future of American animation. I was thrilled to know that this was a hit, that there were kids watching this show today who might one day be inspired by it to draw, to write, and to create.

So now that we’re nearly 1,000 words into this, perhaps you can appreciate my utter horror at the movie’s failings. Not a single aspect of this movie went anywhere close to right. For God’s sake, they mispronounce the characters’ names. Aang (as in “sang”) becomes Ong (as in “wrong’), Sokka (as in “sock”) becomes Soka (as in “soak”). “Agni Ki” becomes “Agni Key”. Iroh transmutes from “Eye-roh” to “Eeee-roh”. As if this wasn’t enough, all but one of the characters pronounces the word “avatar” as “Ahhhvatar”. This is a word that definitely has an English pronunciation, one recently made very famous. The changes in pronunciation might make sense if the characters had been cast using Asian actors, but controversially, everyone’s American. Except for the Fire Nation, which Shyamalan chose to cast as uniformly Indian. Except for Iroh, who is American. What a confusing mess. As a fan of the TV series, the changes to the characters’ names are the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Yo, Shyamalan, why would you do that?

I’m not sure I have the strength to go on. No, wait. I do.

The plot, such as it is, is an unmitigated disaster. As a fan of the TV show, it’s heartbreaking to watch Shyamalan botch scene after scene, and just for kicks, at various points I imagined myself as someone who had never seen the TV series. In this context, the plot of the movie shifts from immensely frustrating to utterly incomprehensible. Katara and Sokka join Aang and leave the Southern Water Tribe before they even know his name. I’m not making this up. The three of them fly off to the Southern Air Temple and only after they land does Aang bother to introduce himself. It was at this point, about fifteen minutes into the movie, that I almost got up and left, before remembering that I had already paid $12.50 to see this catastrophe. It’s as if Shyamalan took four episodes from the first season—”The Boy in the Iceberg”, “The Blue Spirit”, and “The Siege of the North” (Parts I and II)—shoved them into a blender, and strained a script out of the pulp.

Shyamalan is the wrong person to have helmed this project. By his own admission, his preferred method of operation is to take topics typically thought of as trite—ghosts, aliens, mermaids, killer plants, etc—and treat them with absolute seriousness. As such, the tone of Airbender is relentlessly somber, utterly devoid of any of the TV show’s masterful good humor. It’s a weighty, depressing, bland mess, melodramatic to the point of unintentional comedy. The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi, miscast here as the villainous Admiral Zhao, at one point delivers what might be the most ponderous “Yes” ever recorded on film. One almost expects him to follow it up with, “Back to you, Jon.”

Shyamalan makes Michael Bay look like a genius. At least Bay knows how to spend an effects budget to produce an engaging spectacle. Shyamalan misunderstands how martial arts and element bending are supposed to interact, and as a result you get a lot of intricate, pointless flailing that produces very little in the way of action. At one point, an entire troupe of earthbenders launch into a choreographed sequence of stomps and chants, all to launch a single rock at their Fire Nation guards. It’s all very reminiscent of an episode of Power Rangers. Shyamalan has no idea how to direct a proper fight sequence, and everything comes off clumsy, brief, and unconvincing. Whoever cut together the snappy, misleading trailer out of this crap should win an Oscar.

I believe that Airbender has done the impossible. It has unseated Ultraviolet for the title of Worst Movie I Have Ever Seen in a Theater. In Ultraviolet‘s defense—which is a phrase I never thought I’d type—you can at least acknowledge that it’s a bad movie based on bad source materials. Airbender is worse because it’s a bad movie based on truly excellent materials. It’s a waste, a vast, spiraling miscalculation, a perfect example of Hollywood taking what should have been an easy hit and turning it into absolute garbage. It cost Paramount $280 million to produce and market this mess, a mess that caused the audience in my theater to literally boo and hiss as the closing credits rolled. Airbender covers the first of three seasons from the TV show, and I can only hope that this movie bombs badly enough to can the project forever.

It could have been great. Roger Ebert argues that the movie should have stayed a cartoon, but then, he also mistakenly believes that the movie takes place in Earth’s quasi-mystical distant future. Where he got that nugget, I’ll never know. For what it’s worth, I think that Airbender could have been a great movie, an Asian-inspired swashbuckling epic, like The Forbidden Kingdom crossed with The Princess Bride, The Never-Ending Story, or the criminally underrated Stardust. But instead, we got 94 minutes of sodden, deadening nonsense from a man who clearly couldn’t care less about the story in front of him. I hope M. Night Shyamalan is drawn and quartered for this. At least I’ll always have the TV series.

I’m still trying to figure out why I find Kinect so repulsive (Formerly Project Natal. Remember those videos?).

It’s not that I necessarily dislike Microsoft, though it’s never hard to find reasons. Take the Kinect website, for instance. It’s obnoxious that Microsoft asks you to install its proprietary Silverlight platform just to watch some commercials. Sure, this could only be the work of a boneheaded, anti-consumer company, but it doesn’t make me hate Microsoft, per se. I’m now at the point where I look at things like Silverlight or Windows 7 and just laugh. It’s easy to find the humor in such incompetencies when you have the luxury of distance.

It’s not that I necessarily dislike the Xbox 360, either. In days of yore I might have viewed Microsoft as a malevolent interloper in my living room, clawing at my door to steal the toys of my childhood and warp them into some kind of gaming stallion that only a fratboy could love. But that kind of thinking was silly, and it’s irrelevant today. While I don’t own an Xbox, there’s no denying that it’s a solid product. If nothing else, Microsoft has certainly succeeded in creating the definitive online console experience. XBox Live is a deserved triumph. Sony should be abjectly ashamed of the unpolished, disjointed experience they offer in comparison.

Kinect is an ambitious project, even when ignoring Peter Molyneux’s stage magic bullshit. Granted, the Wii has left me deeply skeptical of motion-controlled gaming, but a lot of that is due to the Wii’s pronounced limitations. A more sensitive system could do much more with motion, and I hope that Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move succeed in the places where Nintendo has fallen short.

Given that I don’t hate Microsoft, don’t hate the Xbox, and would like motion interfaces to succeed, why would I use a word like “repulsive” to describe Kinect? I don’t think I could have given you a coherent answer until today. I’d always found Kinect/Natal vaguely unsettling, but this Kotaku article really crystallized things for me. It turns out that although the Kinect does a great job of recognizing your major joints and body language, it can only perform this miracle while you are standing. You cannot use the Kinect while sitting, at least not yet. Or as one Microsoft developer put it, “Sitting is something we’re still calibrating for.”

Sitting is still something we’re calibrating for. First of all, are you joking? The Most Advanced Motion Interface in the History of Forever, Except If Maybe You’d Like to Sit? I suppose that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. But this is a minor concern. I’m sure that they’ll figure out some kind of solution before Kinect is released, which probably won’t be for another year or two anyway. Oh, what’s that? It’s coming in November? Alright. Well, we can expect either some very Microsoftian delays or a fairly disappointing recumbent experience, as Redmond’s PR boys might say. Say what you will about the Wii’s “waggle controls,” but they work just as well sitting as standing.

Second, you might notice that the very first comment on that Kotaku article is from a person with a disability. Are the disabled destined to be shut out of the Kinect experience, he asks? Well, probably, but that’s no different from the general state of console gaming, where the button-remapping functions that would make games more accessible are rare (speaking of which, there’s a petition on exactly this issue). But this isn’t really about disability specifically. I first played video games from a hospital bed. Maybe you played them because you weren’t any good at sports, or because you were too shy to handle people directly. Whether bedridden, fat, skinny, weak, or whatever, when you pick up a controller anything beyond your fingers ceases to matter. Even your eyes are optional. Many, many people play video games specifically to forget about their bodies.

It could be argued that the entire point of gaming—not just the electronic variety, but all gaming—is about escapism. A game like chess allows us to escape the tyranny of the body, but when you’re playing chess, you’re playing chess. In a video game you’re the adventurer, the puzzle savant, the murderer, the chef, the overlord, and the master of limitless domains. Electronic gaming offers the player a unique disconnect between the game and physical reality. The Kinect consciously reverses this. The whole body is the input device, which is how things work in the real world, which negates the entire point of playing these games.

I’m not saying there isn’t a market for this kind of thing. The intuitive touch interfaces of Apple’s wildly popular iOS devices prove that there is (interestingly, I don’t think that the Wii proves anything about motion controls, but that’s another post). I’d rather have the option of a motion interface than not have it, but it’s never going to sell me a system. I will never be the sort of person who finds a constant reminder of his physicality appealing, and I suspect that I am not alone in this.