America, Apocalypse and Anime

There are some spoilers here pertaining to the movies Cloverfield, Watchmen and Knowing, so if you haven't seen them be warned.

When 9/11 hit, certain taboos became self-evident in the media. Sensitive of the national tragedy, any imagery involving the World Trade Center, attacks on major cities - and especially New York, and terrorism in general became hot topics. No longer could terrorism be a blanket kind of bad guy, a default motive for any villain in an action movie - now it was all extremely real to American culture. An interesting example is Man On Wire, which is particularly more potent because of the focus of the two towers, even from a relatively serene, stoic, pre-9/11, stance.

Cloverfield probably most famously crossed over this line, rampaging and destroying Manhattan in full monster movie trappings. New Yorker friends of ours still haven't seen the movie for exactly the fact that destroying the island doesn't hold much entertainment value for them.

Yet in one weekend, we saw Watchmen and Knowing to see the theme re-addressed all over again. Watchmen underwent a specific change to the ending from the graphic novel, removing a lot of graphic carnage from a giant squid for a massive blast instead. Recall that the script was being done when 9/11 was still new, and yet it is interesting that the World Trade Center is prominently displayed in one scene. Knowing seems to direct the action to Manhattan specifically for some apocalyptic scenery.

What I'm wondering is if we won't see more and more of this line being crossed. The analogy here is in anime, where the dropping of the atomic bombs set a tone for the genre which still persists today (not to mention, to be a little circular, monster movies in general where radiated creatures lay waste to urban landscapes). Whether revisting the carnage is cathartic or exploitative is probably a topic for a whole other post, I don't see much reason why American media would diverge from the Japanese direction, and it seems to be following suit. And we've seen this before - science fiction owes much to the Cold War, not only in general themes but having some ancestry in the way aliens and robots are portrayed as well.

I would also expect, especially given the growing similarities between large scale game development and movie production, that games will pick up this trend as well. inFamous comes to mind, for sure.

Google Maps Paranoia

To continue along the theme of the illogical:

The new Google Maps zoom feature zooms all the way into my living room window. See cat on cat perch.

I'm all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my curtains now. I'm going to look into whether it's possible for a person to have pictures of their home removed from Google Maps. Meanwhile, I'm happy to show bb readers the photo in the interest of illustrating creepy privacy violations. Heck, the whole world can see him anyway.

-- Boing Boing: Google Maps is spying on my cat, says freaked out BB reader [BoingBoing]

Followed shortly by another BoingBoing reader who is afraid that *gasp* they might be able to read your license plate!

Wait. Isn't the idea of having a window to allow people to see inside, as well as being able to see the outside? Assuming the cat lady has, you know, neighbors - then this so called invasion of privacy isn't exactly anything new. OK, so some fraction of the net who were looking for an address might now join the numbers of people who either live near, drive around, walk past or bike by this address. Hey, I know - how about alerting one of the largest blogs on the net about it? That's an excellent solution for someone who wants their privacy respected.

Look - someone could be staring into windows right now ... right as we speak. Most likely - it's a complete stranger. Google has nothing to do with that fact - it has been there all along.

And license plates? Someone is worried about their license plate being visible? Realizing of course that if your license plate is not visible that's breaking the law? Because the idea of a license plate is to be publically visible?

The White House has insisted that it has the right to eavesdrop on any citizen, to detained Americans for years without prosecution and use "extreme" interrogation to meet its end.

But by god - let us worry about someone's cat being in a picture on the net.

Scratch - It's Like Flash For Kids

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

-- About Scratch

Unfortunately it mostly runs slow on my low end Mac. The output seems to be a java applet which should be easily deployable in a browser. It's a great idea - a straightforward IDE allows kids (and adults) to design simple interactive animations and games. One of my biggest problems with Flash is the learning curve on just the IDE alone, not to mention the ins and outs of ActionScript and the like.

Also it's completely free and they already have a great community site up for sharing projects.