In August of 2008, I introduced a good friend of mine from my college days to a good friend of mine from my high school days. The original plan was to meet up at Eulogy Belgian Tavern, and I would introduce one to the other in person, but they went behind my back and had a first date on their own. Rob and Rebecca seemed to hit it off quite well, and before long, they’d moved in together, and talked in an idle way about possibly getting married one of these days. Then, this past April, I got a text from Rebecca dropping big news: the talk was becoming reality, spurred on by the impending arrival of their first child. I was to be Best Man. On September 4th, the big day happened. In a catering hall in Langhorne, PA, at about 1:00 PM, Rob Asheuer and Rebecca Friedenberg got legally married in an interfaith ceremony, in front of 100 family and friends.

It’s a remarkable thing watching two people who you know so well get married. It’s even more remarkable when you know that it was you that put the whole thing in motion. Though the day was all about Rob and Becca, their friends, family, and the bridge and groom themselves repeatedly laid down thank-yous and “I’ve heard good things about you”s all afternoon. Standing at the side of the stage, with Rob’s little brothers as groomsmen, handing over the ring, hearing two people who know so well, publicly profess their love for each other, well, it brings a tear to one’s eye. It should be the start of a wonderful life for the both of them.

As part of the Best Man duties, I wrote a short speech/toast for the couple. Here it is:

You know, time goes by fast. When I set these two up, what was it, a couple months ago? When I set these two up, I didn’t expect it to go this far, or this fast. Well, mostly I didn’t expect it to go this fast.

Okay, obviously, it was longer than that, but it feels like it was pretty recently. But, now, here we are, basking in the union of two people who totally deserve each other—and you can take that statement in whatever way you want to. After all, I remember when I told my parents that I was setting Rob and Becca up. Their first remark was, “Well, we know who’s going to be wearing the pants in that relationship.” I think that prediction was borne out, am I right?

So, now, they’re starting that journey of “mawwige,” and hopefully they’ll stick with it for a while. Otherwise, there goies my potential career as a matchmaker down the tubes, so I hope you two keep that in mind before anyone goes calling an attorney somewhere down the line. I have a reputation to uphold now.

To get back to these two, I would like to paraphrase the great Douglas Adams: “They may not have gone where they intended to go, but I think they have ended up where they needed to be.” From what I know of Rob, and what I know of Becca, before they got together—well, we’d be here until tomorrow morning, and I don’t think they’d get the deposit back—this relationship’s brought out the best in both of ‘em.

Rob, Becca, you two are going to be great together. I know it.

Now, don’t prove me wrong.

Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Asheuer. All the best to you.

Robert and Rebecca Asheuer, September 4th, 2010

Come the end of the month, I’ll be ditching Facebook, and I can’t say I’m going to miss it. Facebook, not the Ur-social networking Site, but probably the first thing that comes to mind when you say “social networking” to someone who knows what the term means, has become for me, not simply a way to keep in touch with friends, but an information firehose, spraying me with far too much useless data about people I barely know, and irrelevant nonsense from games I will never play. Oh, then there’s that elephant in the room about privacy. That’s kind of a big thing too. The motivation to dump Facebook like the terribly bad habit it’s become may have been spurred by the company’s unethical practices and generally lackadaisical attitude towards privacy ((Meanwhile, I’m happily offloading to Google all my phone calls, contacts, e-mails, calendar appointments, and other things. I suppose the difference is that Google is a lot more transparent about how they handle that data.)), it’s given me cause to explore just why and how I use this social networking thing in the first place.

At last check, I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Virb ((I won’t have a Virb account for much longer. I only logged in to my Virb account for the first time in over a year just to see if I hadn’t already deleted it.)), Multiply, LiveJournal and probably a few other small-potatoes social networking sites I forgot about. I use Twitter the most, and almost for its intended purpose: a hybrid of microblogging and interpersonal communication. As for Facebook, which I use less, but spend more time on, I’ve yet to figure out a specific purpose to use it for. What began as a way to keep in touch with old friends quickly spiraled into adding anyone I have even the slightest personal connection to: friends from old, pre-social networking Internet communities ((e.g. IRC, message boards and forums, etc.)), former and current co-workers, casual acquaintances, people I met at concerts and bars…

At the time of this writing, I have 136 Facebook friends, which doesn’t sound like a huge number, but it’s turned my Facebook feed into a continual stream of information detached of context, throwing the site’s already poor signal-to-noise ratio into exponential decay with each new “friend”. Facebook’s proclivity to throw in more than just status updates, but crap about Farmville, or Mafia Wars, or whatever stupid application I wasn’t going to use, exacerbated the problem—and blocking one from my feed only resulted in another popping up. The amount of overwhelming noise eventually caused me to miss a good friend’s pregnancy announcement—the sort of thing one would presumably join Facebook to know about. Something needed to change. ((I should have come to this realization a few months ago when I experimented with using the Facebook iPhone app’s Push Notification feature. It didn’t take long to realize I really didn’t need to know that someone I didn’t know had commented on a status update that I had commented on an hour ago.))

Then there’s the privacy thing. I decided to quit Facebook on May 31st, a good couple of weeks before the announced [“Quit Facebook Day”](http://www.quitfacebookday.com/), though the stated reasons overlap nicely. Consider that when Facebook began, it was a closed network: one needed a .edu e-mail address, profiles were locked down, and nobody could see a thing about you beyond the most basic of information, without your consent. Opening the site to everyone wasn’t such a bad thing, but back in December of ’09, the powers-that-be at Facebook decided to throw their previous commitment to privacy out the window, and make sensitive data public without asking first. Next came the scummy defaulting of all personal data to public every time Facebook revised its privacy system. The final nail in the coffin was insisting that information on your profile such as interests, schools, employers, favorite forms of media, etc, be public—or not attached to your profile at all.

A recent article for Wired shows the situation as even more dire, as even your “status updates” become public knowledge. “Care to write a status update to your friends? Facebook sets the default for those messages to be published to the entire internet through direct funnels to the net’s top search engines. You can use a dropdown field to restrict your publishing, but it’s seemingly too hard for Facebook to actually remember that’s what you do.” ([Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative](http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/#ixzz0oUaiTAdb)) Just lovely, isn’t it? Use Facebook to complain about your job, for example, [and it becomes a matter of public record that can be used to fire you](http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g1UPIJSGVsDLJdSC2C4gLyuzucXAD9FOMB6O0). While these things can all be locked down, there’s no guarantee that they will *stay* locked down the next time Facebook decides to revise its policy on privacy.

With the recent talk of forming some sort of alternative to Facebook, such as [ Diaspora](http://joindiaspora.com/), thought should be given to more than just privacy, but how these things are even used. While I’m not adversed to having a social networking site where I am friends (or whatever term they come up with) with near-strangers, I would love for the ability to filter the information I receive in more than a binary on/off way. Certainly, it’s possible to do this with Facebook, but it’s significantly more complicated than I would prefer. In any case, I still need to wonder just why I am compelled to maintain an online relationship with people who are often casual acquaintances. I’m not about to invite them to a party, especially considering geographical distribution of some of these people.

Moving beyond privacy and information reduction, ditching Facebook is, on the face of it, a start in re-evaluating just how I’m going to use social networking tools. Certainly, the need to use Facebook, or its ilk as a collection of people one knows should have gone out the door with the death of Friendster, or at least MySpace. What I want a proper social network to be is a means of continuing and/or improving relationships with people, not simply collecting them and filtering through context-free nonsense. The key change is that the Internet needs to be a tool to strengthen interpersonal relationships, not to decontextualize and reduce them into short “status updates”. I suppose musing on that is for a different essay.

Roger Ebert, well respected film critic, brilliant man, and great writer, has launched a missive claiming that (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html). Certainly, it’s one man’s opinion, and that’s fine. He’s never said we’re not entitled to disagree. I do find myself compelled to wonder just why he harps on it so. As he is a film critic, I suspect it has something to do with (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/6852383/Video-games-bigger-than-film.html). If you’re in film, no matter what side, it’s not hard to feel threatened by this development, either. Of course, the reactions from gamers have been pretty damn vitriolic, as one would expect from the group. [Gaming webcomic Penny Arcade makes a good point](http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/21/), though tempered by calling Ebert’s writing on the subject “reeking ejaculate”. The man [seemed to take it in good enough spirits, though.](http://twitter.com/ebertchicago/status/12591092196) As for myself, I’m forced to take a contrary stance to Roger, though I’m not exactly much of a gamer. Still, as someone with some training in writing and evaluating art… well, an undergraduate degree in English, I think I can shed some light on the subject.

Ebert asks of art:

> Does art grow better the more it imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist’s soul, or vision. Countless artists have drawn countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, most are very bad indeed. How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.

Do we really know? If we knew, even if it’s a matter of taste, why are we still banging on about this argument in 2010 CE? One would think it would be figured out by now if we “know”. I’ll certainly concede Ebert on the point of imitation. Realism in the visual arts often leaves me cold. It’s the Impressionists, the Symbolists, the Surrealists, and other people who use reality as a jumping-off point for expression that really excite me. We’re getting what Ebert would call “the artist’s soul” as a perception filter in those works. Maybe video games lack that.

I suspect the argument comes down to the relationship between art and the audience as determining whether something is art or not. It would seem that the interactivity of a video game is the key thing that splits video games from being “art” in Ebert’s mind. It’s a major argument in his most recent essay on the matter:

> One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This seems to be the crux of the argument: art is experienced, video games are played. To put it differently, art’s purpose is left to the observer; a video game’s purpose is clearly stated. The stated goal of a video game is to score points, beat the boss, save the princess, etc.. By this same argument, one could claim a textbook is not art, as its purpose is delineated, but claim a novel is art, because its purpose is not… except in cases where the novel’s purpose is delineated, such as *Atlas Shrugged* or similar polemic works. ((*Atlas Shrugged* is used here, simply as an obvious example. As for its artistic value, I subscribe to Dorothy Parker’s view: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” I love Dorothy Parker.)) When an artistic work shoves its prescribed interpretation in one’s face, it’s hard to take it on anything more than aesthetic value. Honestly, I find most polemic artwork to be lacking in aesthetics, too. ((Not to harp on here, but Ayn Rand couldn’t write her way out of a wet paper sack with a diamond tipped pen.))

Certainly a video game can captivate the player into a story. It can even create emotion. I recall vividly playing System Shock 2 and wincing as ghosts replayed a massacre of part of the crew in the ship’s dining hall. The sequence in the original Starcraft where Sarah Kerrigan is lost to the alien Zerg, and her resurfacing later in the game as a villain is considered one of the most shocking moments in gaming. Had these scenes been in a film, someone would praise it for its shock, horror, drama, and possibly acting. Of course, in a film, the watcher is passive, while in a game, the player is active—for the most part. It is worth noting that in these games, the scene is passive; no action the player takes can save Sarah Kerrigan.

The other question arises: what of open-ended games like SimCity, with its emergent narrative? The “game”, for those unfamiliar, is simply to build a “city”, with newer versions of the game being remarkably flexible as to what constitutes such a thing. SimCity 4 lets one create anything from a tiny little farming village to a massive, sprawling metropolis. There is no defined goal, no points to be acquired. The only constraint is money. One could, if they felt like it, leave the darn thing open, running, and not build a thing. ((I think somewhere, a too-clever-for-their-own-good installation artist is going to try just that. One may already have.)) The ultimate point behind SimCity, and many similar games, is that one can’t win. The experience is open-ended and there is none of the defined outcomes or even objectives that Ebert uses as an argument. A pre-emptive counterargument would be that SimCity and its ilk are less games, and more artistic tools in themselves; something used to create art rather than be art in itself. Of course, who says that a thing can’t be both. Industrial design, as an example, is commonly held up as a form of artwork. Take [the work of Dieter Rams](http://www.designaddict.com/design_index/index.cfm/fuseaction/designer_show_one/DESIGNER_ID/175/), or that of his spiritual successor, [Apple’s Jonathan Ive](http://designmuseum.org/design/jonathan-ive). What they design may be considered “tools”, but they are tools that carry with them an artistic weight of their own.

Of course, there’s another side to the argument that I’ve not seen thrown out there. The game itself is simply the manifestation of the real art—that of the programmers. A clever algorithm for dynamically resizing textures on the go may not sound like art to the layman, but elegant code is an art all its own in certain circles, both on what it does, and how it looks—enter the [Obfuscated C Code Contest](http://www0.us.ioccc.org/main.html) as an example of programming as an aesthetic. Massive amounts of applied art goes into games beyond the code, these days. Artists design characters, backgrounds and textures. Composers create soundtracks that have become hot commodities in recent years. Game design, in itself, can be considered an art; balancing story-telling, degrees of interactivity, difficulty curve, and a myriad of other things to create a compelling product.

As [Penny Arcade puts it in the aforementioned comic, “If a hundred artists create art for *five years*, how could the result not be art?”](http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/21/) The argument needs to change from not whether video games are art, but to whether video games, as art, are quality art. Is the story compelling? Is the gameplay well thought-out and implemented? Does the game accomplish what it sets out to accomplish? This is already part of the established base question of video game criticism, though video game criticism still hasn’t left the level of a determination to buy the game or not. Film criticism and other art criticism work on that level, but also the larger level, exploring the aesthetic value of art, the meaning of art. Certainly, I’d say that most video games don’t hold up when given that level of scrutiny. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to not only scrutinize games on that level, but also to make games that can stand up to such scrutiny. ((How one could do that would be an essay all its own. I will say that the examples cited in [Kellee Santiago’s TED Talk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9y6MYDSAww&feature=player_embedded), I’m inclined to say that they don’t stand up, even without playing them. “Waco Resurrection” does look like just another shooter, and not even a well-done one. “Flower” seems to barely be a “game” at all. “Braid” might come closest to having critical depth, though.)) That might be enough to convince the unconvincible skeptics of gaming as art.

Recently I made the slightly difficult decision to shut down a personal project of mine; “Apple Outsider” a satirical Apple rumor/news site. Honestly the decision doesn’t break my heart, as my heart wasn’t really in the project to begin with. I had hit the wall with Apple Outsider a good while ago, even before the iPad announcement. While I did try to breathe some life into it about a month or so ago, I realized I was in way over my head.

The difficulties I ran into were small in number, but large in scope. The first was volume. The original intent was to match the Apple news sites like [http://www.macrumors.com](MacRumors) or [http://www.appleinsider.com](Apple Insider), reporting on the same essential events they did with a humorous twist, such as obviously false information, fake spy shots, deep personal gossip on the major players at Apple, etc. These sites however push out multiple high-content value posts per day. Keeping up would be very difficult. I intended to pre-write a significant quantities of articles but when doing so, I ran into the other problem: lack of material.

Folks, the tech world is a dry, dry place—[current freakout over the iPhone prototype aside](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/19/gizmodo-rumors). It is damned hard to find humor opportunity in a rumor about the impending patch for iPhoto or when the next OS update is supposed to come out. Major events and announcements come rarely and while it’s easy to pole fun at the endless rumor cycle, it’s usually the same damn jokes over and over again, which is no fun. The gossip was to fill that hole, but how many jokes can you make about Steve Jobs’s secret personal life anyway? I did enjoy working in Highlander references into the Apple/Google feud but that ran out of fire fast.

I also found out that to stay current on Apple news and rumors would be a full time job in itself. Working a full time job, and not having eight hours to day catching up on Apple minutiae leaves a lot of gaps. How was I supposed to keep up? Other parody sites, like [The Onion](http://www.theonion.com) have full-on teams of writers to maintain its massive output—as well as a broader focus. A one-man show simply wouldn’t be able to cut it. In the end, I’m glad to let Apple Outsider go. It’s one less albatross around my neck keeping me from other projects, plus one less domain to renew each year.

There’s a hole in my software library. I need a place, an application, to hold my stuff. I don’t mean any specific stuff, I mean my “general” stuff. After all, I have an app for music files, an app for contact information, an app for photographs, and so on. There’s no place, however, for all the digital ephemera such as notes, whether in scrap form or more detailed things, larval and finished blog posts, ideas, song lyrics, story ideas, inspirational bits of web design to borrow/copy/steal [1], receipts, software licenses, financial documents, and any other bits of data that I don’t want to dump into the file system. I also want an application that allows me to take chunks of this data on the go with my iPhone, ideally through some sort of cloud service.

I do not have this application. I have tried many, and many have come close. Some have come far closer than others. What I need is classified under the category of “junk drawer applications”, and there are more than a few for the Mac. Of the many I have tried, I have settled on a single solution—or rather a pair of solutions that are best at handling two major groups of data that I work with. Actually, there’s three applications in this solution, but two of them work so seamlessly as to almost be one. These solutions synchronize data to the cloud and to my iPhone, allowing for quick reference of data wherever I may roam. [2]

Notational Velocity and Simplenote

The key pairing of Notational Velocity on the Mac and Simplenote on the iPhone has been a lifesaver and a half. The vast majority of my data is stored in some sort of text format, varying from plain text to structured text (e.g. HTML and Markdown) to Rich Text. Notational Velocity handles all of these with aplomb, and has a darn spiffy incremental search feature in its UI. Assuming I wanted to search for a serial number for an application, I type in “Serial” into NV’s field, it shows every single note with “Serial” in the contents. It’s beautiful and simple.

Notational Velocity gets really fun when I integrate it with Quicksilver. By default, NV stores all of its content in a single database, but it can be set to store the content in individual HTML, Rich Text, or plain text files, all kept in a single folder. Setting it up as plain text files allows for all sorts of fun with Quicksilver and its Text Manipulation Module functions. Example: among the files I keep are lists of books to read, fiction and non-fiction. I also keep running lists for music to check out, jobs to apply for [3], articles to write, and an Agenda file for just getting little bits down on the run. Should someone suggest I read a new book, I summon Quicksilver with a quick Cmd-Space, type in the name of the book, hit tab, type “App” which selects “Append to…”, tab again, and then type “Fiction” to select the text file with my list of books. Once I hit return, the file is updated. This sounds more complicated than it really is. I can also use Quicksilver or Mac OS X’s Services menu to make new notes from selected text, or whatever, without touching the application. I don’t lose my focus from whatever I’m doing at the time either. Keeping all my notes as text files also allows me to use TextMate, my text editor of choice, rather than NV’s built in editor.

While on the run, I am able to access all of these things with Simplenote. Simplenote and Notational Velocity work together, keeping all my textual data in sync via the Simplenote web service. On the iPhone, Simplenote exists as almost a perfect clone of NV, right down to the minimal UI and incremental searching. While I might not need everything I keep in NV on my iPhone, text is so lightweight that it doesn’t take up a great deal of space. The combination of the two applications keep my synchronized at will. Of course, Simplenote and Notational Velocity only work for the aforementioned text stuff. Anything slightly more intense requires its own solution.

Evernote

Therefore, the other half of my setup uses Evernote which serves to hold all that which Notational Velocity can’t. Where NV manages text, Evernote manages PDFs, images, audio files, and other bits of this-and-that. It has its own native, first party iPhone app with cloud synchronization. It also has granular control over what gets synchronized, so if I need to have the receipt for my bus ticket, I can find it on my phone, but tax forms and things don’t ever leave my desktop. This sort of control is something Notational Velocity lacks, but considering the sort of data likely to end up in Evernote versus NV, it’s a requirement on this side, and not a wish-list item.

One of the best use cases I have for Evernote is for business cards. When I get a new card, I snap a picture of it with my iPhone in the Evernote app. The picture is then run through some sort of OCR [4] and the text in the image is made searchable. A quick search for a person’s name, or their company will bring up any cards from them, and there’s no need to keep the actual card or enter their contact information anywhere. Far from being a simple Rolodex, the image-to-text capability of Evernote has plenty of other uses that I am still exploring. I plan to start using it as a way to develop a scrapbook of design inspiration, whether by taking photos of real-life items that inspire, or by using the Web Clipping feature to snap bits of websites and hold screenshots.

The biggest downside to Evernote is that it’s a freemium service. The desktop client has small, unobtrusive ads, but there are also limits on what you can load in, and how much you can synchronize per month. Paying removes the limits, and adds PDF searching along with encryption. [5] At five dollars a month, It’s a tempting consideration, perhaps when my income levels stabilize I will go for it. [6] Evernote would also be wonderful if I could encrypt and password protect certain bits of data, like my financial documents.

Room for Improvement

Honestly, while this setup is perhaps the most optimal of the current solutions, I would kill for a single application that I can use for both. As stated before, some have come so amazingly close. The closest has been DevonThink is stupidly powerful, holds anything you throw at it, and is also great at connecting little bits of data. Where it fell down for me was the lack of portability. While the newest version has an iPhone web app to access things, it works with an embedded web server in the application. I’m not going to leave my computer on all the time if I’m on the go. Without a native iPhone app, it’s just useless. Other applications I’ve tried, and that have failed are Yojimbo, MacJournal, Journler , and Mori. Each failed at scalability, portability and sometimes even stability.

If any Mac developer out there is reading this [7], if you could put together an application that combined the flexibility and openness of Notational Velocity, the text recognition and granular syncing of Evernote, and the “throw anything in here”-ness of DevonThink, mix it with web-based syncing and note-level encryption and/or password protection, give it a simple but powerful UI, and add a native iPhone app, I would pay good money for it. I mean, really good money. Considering that over the past four years, I’ve probably dropped about $100 on “junk drawer” applications in one form or another, I’d gladly spend that much again on one really good application that does all of the things I want and does them well. I’d even be willing to spend an additional $10 on an iPhone version. Someone just needs to make it happen. Until then, I suppose, “good enough” will have to be good enough.