Since I’m a gamer I tend to run across a lot of Worst Games lists. Likewise with movies and Worst Movies lists. And since the Internet is a place with a lot of information, a large desire to fit in, and a disturbingly pervasive zeitgeist, a lot of games and movies make these lists time and again. For video games, we have E.T. the Extraterrestrial (which almost singlehandedly collapsed the home video game market in the early 1980s) and Custer’s Revenge (revenge rape porn** on the Atari 2600, and no I am not making this up, and no I will not link it to you). For movies, it’s fare like Manos: the Hands of Fate (“popularized” by its feature on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and North (great actors, actually kind of an interesting premise, catastrophically bad implementation).

These entries turn up a lot. And when I say “a lot” I mean “on every list of this kind”. So here’s a thought: let’s give them a bye. Let’s all universally acknowledge that yes, these games and movies are stinkers. If someone put one on the coffee table you’d run out of the room holding your nose. We get it. The next time you make a Top Ten Worst Whatever list, look for entries that you know are on every other list out there – and remove them. Make a note at the beginning: “Yes, we know ET was absolute crap. We’ve all agreed on that. It transcends the scale. For the purpose of this list, it’s actually in negative numbers. Let’s move on.”

Because, really, I’d like to see a Top Ten Worst Games where I didn’t know with absolute certainty what was going to be #1 on the list. I think we can all agree that that would be a good thing.

* It entertains me that I have a pre-existing WP tag for “kvetching”.
** Man, the Google hits I’m going to get for that.

I’ve mocked up a new design for the blog, and I’d like your feedback on it. It keeps a few elements of the current blog, but it’s an entirely new theme and feel. Please let me know what you think! Any response is a good response, even if it’s just “I like it” or “I hate it!”. :)

On the one hand, I want to write a blog that provides actual value and has readers who are there for the content.

On the other hand, I want a place to talk about the issues I’m dealing with.

Lost In Translation is, sadly, kind of a middle ground, and suffering for it. On the one hand, I feel somewhat safe talking about my issues here, because frankly, I don’t have a lot of readers and so I’m relatively insulated from shoe-throwing. On the other hand, I feel like I should be providing value with my blog, and so I tone down the discussion of issues (and often don’t discuss them at all). On the gripping hand, I never post any content that’s not All About Me because I feel like anyone who came here, saw that, and then went back into the archives and saw just me and my subscription would be disappointed and frustrated.

And yet I don’t really want to start Yet Another Blog, because it’s already hard enough keeping up with two.

Back to the horns for now.

The first part is Ether.

To understand this you need to go back a little over a hundred years. Physicists of the 19th century were struggling to understand how light got from the sun to the Earth, and why it behaved the way it did; the belief that light was a particle explained many of its behaviors (like reflection) but not others (like refraction). To explain this, scientists proposed a medium through which light traveled, the luminiferous aether. Invisible and omnipresent, it allowed light to travel through what was otherwise assumed to be a vacuum, and faster-than-light propagation of waves caused by the light explained the odd non-particle behaviors.

Naturally, Einstein showed up in the early 20th century and screwed the whole thing up with Special Relativity, but that’s neither here nor there.

In the mid-70s, engineers at Xerox developed a computer-networking protocol that was superior both in speed and in usability to the then-prevalent but highly-proprietary Token Ring and Token Bus systems. Unlike the Token systems, each system on Xerox’s network could see each other system, regardless of whether the systems were linked serially (that is, each computer hooked to the next in sequence, like elephants in a row, trunk-to-tail), hubwise (a central core into which each computer hooked, like an octopus), or otherwise. The new networking protocol, in effect, allowed the computers to pretend that there was an invisible, pervasive medium surrounding them, through which they could propagate messages to other systems, much like the sun propagated light to the planets.

In a fit of pique, the Xerox engineers (who were now working with Digital and Intel to finalize the standard) named their protocol after the luminiferous aether, and thus Ethernet – the networking protocol by which the vast majority of local internet nodes communicate – was born.

The second part is jammer, and although it’s a lot simpler to explain, I’ll wager that fewer of the people who read this will have run across the origin of this part before.

To understand this part, we need to go back to the late Age of Sail, just before the advent of steamships. There were two major classes of shipping vessels then: the clippers, which held a smaller cargo and were less maneuverable but were much faster, and the windjammers, which were larger and slower, but carried more cargo, were more maneuverable, and – speed aside – were generally more capable ships than the clippers. (Both of these, sadly, were displaced by steamships, which – unlike clippers and windjammers, which were both sailing ships – were not reliant on the wind to get from point A to point B.)

Combining the two gives us Etherjammer: a large, flexible, maneuverable ship that plies the open Ethernet; not the fastest ship in the fleet, but adaptable and able to deal with a wide array of tasks.

(Yes, it’s a metaphor.)

In this kind of post, this is the point where I’d usually say “wish me luck!”. But since I’m moving into the future, instead, I’ll say Luck? Where we’re going, we don’t need luck!

(Title gag courtesy greyseer.)