In ancient times, I probably wouldn't have been an explorer. The world was too big.
But now, the world is small. So what few places aren't well-charted, or known, or inhabited, always leave me curious.
In the real world, this is true of small Pacific islands used by Americans in the mid-20th century. There are places that were of serious importance for things ranging from guano mining to logistics in fighting against the Japanese to nuclear bomb testing. And since those uses they've been largely abandoned.
For many of them, the US Fish & Wildlife Service stops in "every year or two" to check up. Aside from that, it's wild birds and wild cats that were brought along on ships. Maybe the occasional airstrip for emergency landings.
I mean, we could go to these places. It's possible. We just don't, because they're not important anymore. Who knows what they'll be needed for again in the distant future.
Meanwhile, think of the people who still do go. They're either military personnel there to clean up an airfield, or Fish & Wildlife staff to record a statistic or two. Are these jobs totally cushy positions because they're quiet and situated on the world's most private beaches? Or are they hideous for being so disconnected from modern society?
I get the same vibe from the Internet.
No, really.
The absolute center core of the net is a more fascinating way to explore history than any museum could be. Just take the endings of web addresses you know and love: .com, .net, .org, .edu and so on. Then add in the countries: .uk, .jp, .kr, etc. And the miscellaneous stuff like .biz, .info, and even .museum. (All of these endings are called domains, so keep that in mind if I drop that word later on). But there's more than that.
For a while there, you could just enter in http://to/ and that was a valid address. (That's really .to, the two-letter code for Tonga, but since there's no words before it you don't even need the dot). But there's also .arpa used in the root networks - the guys who tie the backbones of the backbones together. That's because ARPA, the US military's research agency, funded the inventing of the Internet. And their basic stuff, which was supposed to be replaced, is now keeping the entire world connected.
Then there's a whole shadow Internet outside that system. Anonymizer software, frequently used in countries with repressive regimes, uses domains like .onion and .freenet. These things are "on the Internet" in the sense that you access them over a network with your computer, but they're also "not on the Internet" because it's not within this one big unified network.
But it's not limited to just democracy advocates trying to fly under the radar. Allegedly, NSA internal email uses .nsa and Hotmail's internal workings are inside .gbl, so that they can't be reached easily by random Joes on the Internet. As far as your computer is concerned, it's never heard of .nsa or .gbl.
The Internet wasn't always so centralized for ordinary users, and technically still isn't. Leaving the domain stuff behind for a second, dial-up services in the 90s like AOL and CompuServe often listed what features their service came with. A lot of it involved special content or unique chat rooms, but it was also access to certain parts of what was coming together as The Internet. So they listed 'WWW Access' as just one feature alongside other stuff like Usenet and Gopher. Nowadays, things are much simpler: your ISP sells you Web access and off you go, because the Web ended up replicating the functions of Usenet (forums), Gopher (uh, just browsing), Finger (blogs) and so on. [Yes, techies, I'm glossing over the differences between domains and protocols. Apples and oranges. If you know, that's great, but I'm not burdening readers who've made it this far with that.]
But those things didn't die forever. You can still use Usenet and Gopher. Usenet fell into the hands of warez jockeys, so ISPs dropped it and you have to go pay someone a subscription for access. Gopher is around, and free, and usable right now with a Firefox plugin or alternative browsers like Camino. Wikipedia suggests that there are 150 Gopher servers hanging around. That's a tiny amount. On that alone I gather it's a little old club for old guys who enjoyed "the good old days" on Gopher sites and occasionally want to stroll down memory lane.
But in a sense, playing with these things is like diving backwards in time. Gopher, or Darknet (which is a spinoff of the .onion thing mentioned above), lets you see what the Web looked like in the 90s. For me it's a whirlwind back to childhood. It's the only history museum that's ever been interesting, and it's because you can actually relive some experiences, however trivial, instead of looking at an object in a glass case and making your imagination do all the work. So it is as the root of the Internet, too. We take for granted that the entire thing is held together by some links that ARPA strung together in the 70s and 80s.
What we have now will eventually be Memory Lane too. The ARPA stuff is staying in place, even with a big conversion we'll all have to make to IPv6, but the whole domain thing is about to get real freaky. They added support for foreign languages. So right now, if you're Japanese and you want to read about Nintendo, you to go www.nintendo.co.jp - those are English letters, which many Japanese aren't so good with. (That's probably why they picked up QR codes so fast, but that's a different story.) In the future, it'll look more like: http://例え.テスト. By the way, you actually can click that. Look at what it does to your URL bar!
This stuff blows my mind. IT'S SO COOL!
Ahem. Sorry. Nerd freakout.
It all makes me wish I could see that root. Maybe it's like getting out of the Matrix and meeting the Architect. Granted, it's probably just a data center somewhere, but it's only in Hollywood that the inside of the clockworks looks interesting. The core of the Internet is put together by an offshoot of IEEE, which is a big academic body for engineering.
So basically, whether you're on the world's most remote island, or at the center of mankind's greatest invention, you're really looking at a handful of academic types hanging around, being all academic-y.
There's an awesome book in that parallel somewhere.
In the last month or so, I've fallen in love with telecasts of Formula 1 and American Le Mans Series races. You should too, and here's a few awesome reasons why:
An amazing team sport. Winners often credit their teams (that is, their crews and engineers), while the crews and engineers treat the driver like another part of the car. That's not a lack of respect, that's chemistry to an extreme. A football team specializes only along the range from huge and fast to huge and faster. A racing team ranges from PhD mechanical engineers to dudes who can lift serious weight using their necks.
Travel the world. Formula 1 hits a new destination in the world about every two weeks. Gaming career, what? What's a startup? I totally want to do something menial for Red Bull's F1 efforts just so I can follow the team around.
Way less advertising. Advertising in American sports has gotten way out of control. The first down line is sponsored. The line of scrimmage is sponsored. The scoreboard is sponsored. The commentators' predictions for who wins are sponsored. Individual clever comments or identifications of key plays are sponsored. The halftime show is sponsored. The two-minute warning is sponsored. Instant replays are sponsored. Oh, and the postgame show is sponsored too.
ALMS? In two and a half hours of continuous racing I've seen maybe 2 minutes of commercials and a 2-minute shameless plug interview with someone from Mobil 1. F1? Can't recall any shameless plugging, at least on the BBC broadcasts. Sure, there's plenty of logos all over the cars and drivers, but that doesn't detract from actually watching the action. Nor do commercials, because there really aren't any.
Decent announcers. You might enjoy Charles Barkley's trrbl talk but I could use something a little more intelligent. Racing announcers aren't always MENSA members, yes, but they're capable of taking complicated engineering talk and reducing it down to pedestrian levels. Pretty cool.
Plays nice with new technology. F1 fan? BBC's iPlayer has you covered. Le Mans fan? ESPN3 lets you watch entire races, commercial-free. No blackouts, no regional nonsense (unless you're British - I torrent F1 since there are no US sources to my knowledge), and no other such silliness deriving from American cable TV monopolies.
So join me and start watching so we can talk about the races!
Holy moly, school hit me hard. I haven't updated what I've been consuming since last summer. Well then, it's time to catch up, and to do so quickly, I'm going to borrow a concept coined by my dear friend and colleague Adam Wright: the Instareview.
The Instareview is almost like a haiku in that it conveys a lot of information, or one very poignant idea, using a minimum of words. Hopefully, it'll take less time than dilly-dallying in the details and the track listings and the analysis, but still give a good idea of how I really feel about something.
Let's get to trying this out!
Music
Cee-Lo Green, The Lady Killer - Good all the way through, not just 'Fuck You.' A classic? Maybe not.
DJ Deckstream, Deckstream Soundtracks 2 - Like a gourmet steak from a fusion place: weird first taste, but definitely meaty with a great aftertaste. On heavy rotation.
Jasmine, Dreamin - The only ever time I've 'pulled an Aroon' and played one song, on repeat, for hours on end.
Kenichiro Nishihara, Humming Jazz - In a post-Nujabes world, there's a gap in Japan's hip-hop, and Nishihara comes closer than anyone else to filling it. Don't miss the collab with Substantial.
modal soul classics vol. 2, DEDICATED TO NUJABES - Speaking of Nujabes, his old crew released an album to say goodbye. You can hear the celebration of life in some tracks and the hurt in others.
Kero One, Kinetic World - An album so DIY, you can hear the Garageband in it. (But I'm still psyched for his next one, or a live show).
Lupe Fiasco, Lasers - 18 tracks of some overproduced rapper (feat. Lupe Fiasco).
Passion Pit, Manners - I admit it. I'm hooked. Love these guys. Next thing you know I'll be driving a Volkswagen, using Apple products and watching comedies on ABC. Wait a second...
Think Twice, With a Loop and Some String - Half of Specifics does his 'own' album, half of which is collab with Specifics MC Golden Boy anyway. Who knew Canadian hip-hop was so consistently good?
Games
Yakuza 3 - Are you a Japanophile? Did you like Shenmue? Do you like some really good narrative in your games? The more you answered yes, the more you should play this game. I'm biased, but it was my game of 2010.
Gran Turismo 5 - It's Pokemon with cars. BRB, gotta keep catching 'em all.
DJ Hero 2 - Everything I, the boy who fantasizes of DJing, wanted 1 to be. Devastated there won't be a 3.
Halo: Reach - Bungie knows how to stay ahead of the curve.
StarCraft II - I'm too white to play this game. I'm also too white to play football. Doesn't stop me from loving watching either one as a sport.
You Don't Know Jack - Best trivia game ever gets best modern revival ever.
Super Mario Galaxy 2 - First time I've ever said 'meh' to a Mario game. What happened?
Professor Layton and the Unwound Future - First time I've ever said 'meh' to a Layton game. What happened?
Call of Duty: Black Ops - Now's a great time to sell your Activision stock.
Red Dead Redemption - Objectively, extremely well made, but I can't get it out of my head that this is GTA4 with horsies. Sorry, Rockstar SD.
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood - The cool kids call it AssBro for short. And they stick to the extremely addictive multiplayer mode.
Movies
The Social Network - This movie speaks my language: specifically, techie startup business technobabble written by Aaron Sorkin. If you're me, you'll love it.
Sucker Punch - What's the word for "a mess of messes"?
Pirate Radio - Every bit as cool as 60s/70s Britain.
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OK, so it's not as good as Adam's work, but man, I had a lot of pop culture to get off my chest there.