More Homage: The Outer Worlds

Games are a form of play, they are fun, as are making cultural references and homage, as I've pointed out a bunch in other games. Game-makers make fun things (games), and they put fun things into those games (homage). Most of the homage I've noticed in games is to sci-fi and fantasy cultural objects (this makes sense), but here's a reference to the Beatles in the game The Outer Worlds, specifically the Beatles' song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".

Edit: Here's more, somewhat of a random Easter egg, referring to Firefly, a nice touchstone series for recent space sci-fi fans. I hadn't encountered this the first time I played through, and it's random and you can't do anything to make it happen or not, it just does (so I had no idea about it until I ran into it). It is... cows. In your cargo hold.

It was so weird I took a screen shot. (Well, of my TV.)

Edit 2: Apparently there is a lot of homage in The Outer Worlds, but I wasn't looking for it during my first playthrough (and you won't necessarily encounter all of it in one playthrough anyways). H.P. Lovecraft is a favorite, although I only recently learned he was a horrible racist (which is a shame, as I was happy he was from Rhode Island). Jordan Peele and JJ Abram's "Lovecraft Country" sounds really great!

Lovecraft's story title is "The Doom that Came to Sarnath." 

"The Years We Had Contageous Deseases"

What we're going through now is indeed unusual, but only in terms of its scale and scope. We're better prepared to deal with it in terms of health technology than previously (for instance we have ventilators, but not enough in the right places). The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919 is mentioned a lot as an example, but that overlooks the much smaller-scale but yet constant contagious afflictions that affected people and destroyed lives year after year. Before vaccines, antibiotics, and a better understanding of human health, death was more of a presence in many countries compared to today. Remember polio? No? Good, you don't want to.

For a child in the first decade of the new century, 1900-1909, to make a list titled "The Years We Had Contageous Deseases", reminds us of what it was like to some extent. (The quoted child happens to be the anthropologist Margaret Mead, in Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King, from Doubleday, 2019, p. 127)

I'd also recommend The Ghost Map, by Johnson, 2006.

US Maps in R

A really great read (it's a chapter) about the use of maps in R (at least, US maps specifically), from Kieran Healy's Data Visualization. What are you trying to show with your map? What is your data? Is it spatial? Or, maybe it's actually about population, so why is Montana bigger than Connecticut?

There are some great projections, there's the standard geographical one, and the weird "geography squished into population size" one (Figure 7.1, lower left), and the electoral college/population one isn't bad depending on what you are trying to do (Figure 7.1, lower right), although I end up liking the one that makes all the states the same size, each a square (statebins, in section 7.3). (Of course, what is a state? They are not all comparable at all! What is Washington, D.C.? Why not Puerto Rico? Etc.!)

No post about maps is complete without XKCD's heatmap comic and another on map projections, as well as a link to the segment from The West Wing about map projections which everyone should watch.

Geertz and Global Tides

As the world becomes more thoroughly interconnected, economically and politically, as people move about in unforeseen, only partially controllable, and increasingly massive, ways...(1)

Geertz was writing about identity, as can be seen from the rest of the quote, but it is relevant at the moment what with the novel coronavirus, covid-19. I am sure that Castells has something similar in one of his great, perhaps today overlooked, The Information Age trilogy books.


(1) Geertz, C. (2012). Available light: Anthropological reflections on philosophical topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The Internet, Phonebooks, and Privacy

A really interesting statement from Xfinity/Comcast:

We will no longer make available any directory listing information about our Xfinity Voice customers through ecolisting.com, directory assistance, or print publications. This includes names, phone numbers, and addresses. We also will not share any of this information with third-party publishers.
We're making this change as part of our ongoing commitment to enhance customer privacy. 

Why is this so interesting? It speaks directly to the issue of unforeseen social consequences and new technology.

Early in the days of pushing the information revolution, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of idea about information and change were bandied about. Two of them, relevant here, were easier access to information generally with phone numbers and addresses as an example, and the other was the end of the paper phone book (saving lots of trees, it was said, more marketing and less fact).

Starting with the paper phone book, well there are giant paper phone books from who knows what advertising-driven company delivered to my door every year. When I lived in NYC, trucks would roll around the city and low-paid workers would deposit phone books on everyone's stoops. I've received them here in Massachusetts as well in the last year. So, no, the phone book did not go away, although the companies, its specific name, and its economic model are very different from AT&T's yellow pages of the 1970s and 1980s that were completely necessary back then.

But free access to information online didn't work out either: when you try to look someone up online, unless they have put their contact information up themselves, it's often paywalled and the Google results usually look pretty dodgy. If you get an unknown phone call (my recent ones are "from" Chicago and Michigan [they almost always fake the source phone number] and feature a recorded message in Chinese with music in the background, which says something about the economics of the phone-spam industry reaching out to non-English speakers in the US) and you Google the number to do a reverse lookup (a simple database operation), it is often very hard to get any information at all, although this could be because the number that shows up on your caller ID isn't actually in service. The point is, you can't actually look people up easily unless they are fairly digitally oriented.

So, we still have paper phone books, but they are not exactly the paper phone books from 40 years ago, and we still can't look people or phone numbers up online (I am tempted to mention the "where's my flying car?" trope, but we have flying cars, it's just that we call them helicopters and they are incredibly more complex than today's regular cars), and, to come back to Xfinity, maybe we don't even want this information available--when it was merely in a paper phonebook, restricted to who had access to those phonebooks, that was one thing, but in today's digital world where Macedonian teenagers can make websites devoted to fake news stories (which are shared to Facebook or via Twitter and then can make their way up the news hierarchy to actual televised news shows), maybe having easy access to everything is not the best idea. (I'll avoid a tangent to how newspapers, despite being driven by advertising revenue, still mostly cared about the advertisements they ran in their pages, but Facebook and Twitter don't see it that way.)

UK Tabloids and Royalty

Really interesting and depressing comparison of headlines of the Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle (as an American, we have no royal titles, so I'll just label them princesses as in "married to princes" but they have titles and such) and the racism and perhaps classism of the British tabloid press (perhaps it's even intersectional). The point is to show this happens at all, and hey, here it is. Shameful. But what is to be done about it?

"Here Are 20 Headlines Comparing Meghan Markle To Kate Middleton That Might Show Why She And Prince Harry Are Cutting Off Royal Reporters"
Subtitled, Over the years, Meghan has been shamed for the same things for which her sister-in-law, Kate, has been praised.

HICSS 53

HICSS 53 is underway, and this is the fourth year we've run the Games & Gaming minitrack in the Digital and Social Media track. Great to have all the hard work come to fruition.