“Last Resort” is about the crew of a nuclear submarine, declared pariahs, who find a tropical island and start building their own civilization there.

As far as I can tell, it’s the first submarine-based show since the late “SeaQuest DSV,” a corny, uneven, very-1990s sci-fi drama that nonetheless was a formative show for me. (It was cancelled partway through its first season, just as it had started to find its footing by discarding the post-Cold War utopianism and paranormal elements that had weighed down the first two seasons.) There’s always been something I’ve found cool about submarines — the alien undersea environment, the close quarters, the tension from observing the world only indirectly through sensors.

The show also seems to mirror eerily closely a game/exercise I used to do with a friend when I was in first grade or so. Inspired by SeaQuest, we would make up and act out a scenario where a super-powerful submarine started its own country (and then conquered the world, because obviously) from a base on some tropical island. Hawaii? I can’t remember. Anyway, it was pretty sweet, and ABC has clearly plagiarized me.

But from then on until now, I’ve enjoyed world-building — making up new places, new countries, new societies, from the very mundane to the fantastical. Watching the formation of a new community was one of the coolest parts of the late great “Deadwood,” and I’m hoping “Last Resort” follows through.

A lot could still go wrong — the series could be corny or predictable, the writing could suck, it could get major network interference. But I’ve got my hopes up for “Last Resort,” which just from the premise seems aimed squarely at my interests.

He’ll go into the record books with the second-highest strikeout rate in Major League Baseball history, behind only surefire Hall of Famer Randy Johnson.

Wood’s retirement today also unseated a less momentous mark. As he struck out Dayan Viciedo and then walked off the field to a standing ovation and the waiting arms of his young son Justin, my eyes unexpectedly teared up.

That hadn’t happened to me, as near as I can remember, in about six years.

It was undeniably an emotional moment, but I’m clueless as to what about that scene pushed me over the edge when other intense times haven’t cracked my stoicism.

I’m not complaining. Baseball is one of my biggest passions, and Kerry Wood has been at the center of that since the beginning.

The 1998 baseball season was when I first started really following the Cubs at the age of 11. It was also Wood’s rookie season, when Kid K threw arguably the greatest game ever pitched and along with Sammy Sosa helped lift a previously sad-sack Cubs team into the postseason. The next year he went down to injury, and Wood was periodically hurt for the rest of his career. That arguably prevented him from being an all-time great, or from at least having the chance. But when Wood was healthy — in 2003, when with Mark Prior he led the Cubs to the brink of the World Series, or again in 2008 when he was a shut-down closer for the greatest Cubs team in at least half a century.

(Read my memories of a 2003 Cubs-Yankees game, started by Wood.)

After getting essentially dumped by the Cubs the next year, he wandered to the Indians and Yankees, then took a well-below-market deal to come back to his original team. He was effective last year, but got off to an ugly start this season, still throwing hard but unable to locate his strikes.

Today, Wood announced that he’d retire — after one last batter. His previous outing, he’d gotten shelled and thrown his glove into the stands, and Wood didn’t want that to be his last appearance.

So he put together a doozy. Wood came into the game in a tense situation, with the Cubs down by one run, a runner on first and one out. This wasn’t a mop-up job. The news of Wood’s impending retirement had leaked before the game started, and by the time this happened everyone knew this was Kid K’s last hurrah.

When Wood was called into the game, the TV cameras caught him shake hands with bullpen coach Lester Strode — a simple but powerful moment. He got an ovation walking onto the mound. The Cubs announcers noted that the White Sox batter, Viciedo, was a free-swinger, making it a perfect matchup for a fireballing pitcher struggling with his command.

Wood started Viciedo off with a 96 mph fastball that Viciedo swung late on, fouling it off. Next came a curveball in the zone, that Viciedo again fouled off. It was 0-2, and the whole stadium wanted the same thing: one last K.

Before Wood threw his third pitch, WGN showed the most famous clip of Wood’s career: his strikeout of Derek Bell for the 20th strikeout in his record-tying 20-strikeout game. My eyes still pop at how much Wood’s slider breaks — truly an unhittable pitch:

The last pitch of Wood’s career was not nearly so filthy. He no longer threw that ridiculous breaking ball, a casualty of repeated arm surgeries and changes in his herky-jerky pitching motion to try to prevent even more injuries. Instead Wood went with a curveball, in the dirt. Viciedo swung through it. Catcher Welington Castillo recovered and threw to first.

It was the 1,582nd strikeout of Woods’ career, a career known for strikeouts. It wasn’t just the one game — Wood, when healthy, regularly struck out more than 200 batters per season, often leading the league. He was the fastest major leaguer ever to 1,000 strikeouts. He averaged more than a strikeout per inning in his career. If he’d been healthy, maybe Wood could have touched 3,000 strikeouts.

The next batter up was a righty, too, but acting manager Jamie Quirk wasn’t going to take a chance of Wood spoiling his last outing. His final appearance — unless he changes his mind — will be that strikeout of Dayan Viciedo.

It was what came next that moistened my eyes.

As the crowd at Wrigley Field came to its feet, all the players on the field congratulated Wood with hugs and handshakes. He tipped his hat to the fans as Justin ran from the dugout onto the field, into Woods’ waiting arms. The opposing White Sox players paid their respects. After working his way through another round of hugs and handshakes in the dugout, Wood emerged again onto the field for one last curtain call, waving his had and touching his heart, thanking the fans who had cheered for him for more than a decade.

It was arguably the most poignant Cubs moment (as opposed to moments of elation and depression) at least since Ron Santo’s jersey was retired and he told the Wrigley crowd, “This IS my Hall of Fame.”

(Note: It’s an absolute travesty that as near as I can find, there is no audio or video of that moment available on the Internet.)

Up until today, Kerry Wood had been the last real through-line to the start of my baseball fandom. But loving a sport always transcends loving a player, and Wood’s emotional goodbye won’t be any different for me.

Wood probably could have gutted out the year, turned his season around, and been a valuable member of the Cubs, even if his days of dominance were over. But he decided the end had come, that he wanted to go out on his own terms — and did it.

What better way to retire than that?

The Canadian folk singer included “The Idiot” on his 1981 album Northwest Passage, part of a series of concept albums Rogers was doing on different regions of Canada. His earlier work had focused on the maritime life in Atlantic Canada, but Northwest Passage touched on the country’s north and west.

Specifically, “The Idiot” was about a man from eastern Canada who moved to Alberta to work in the oil industry:

I often take these night shift walks when the foreman’s not around

I turn my back on the cooling stacks and make for open ground

Far out beyond the tank farm fence where the gas flare makes no sound

I forget the stink and I always think back to that eastern town

He’s been driven to this move because of economic collapse elsewhere in the country:

I remember back six years ago, this western life I chose

And every day, the news would say some factory’s going to close

Despite the good pay, the narrator doesn’t particularly like the work:

This western life’s no paradise, but it’s better than lying down

Oh, the streets aren’t clean, and there’s nothing green, and the hills are dirty brown

But he considers it an improvement on living off charity, specifically government welfare, which he says will “rot your soul”:

Well, I could have stayed to take the dole, but I’m not one of those

I take nothing free, and that makes me an idiot, I suppose

Today, North Dakota is in the midst of an oil boom. It’s attracted thousands of workers, largely young men, to work in dangerous but high-paying jobs. The environment, in particular, is unpleasant, with a severe housing shortage driving workers into makeshift “man camps” and driving up a boom in strip clubs, bars — and crime. But there’s plenty of work to be had, with low unemployment rates and plenty of money to go around to workers, businesses and governments alike.

What would Stan Rogers think, had he not died in a 1983 plane crash?

So bid farewell to the eastern town you never more will see

There’s self-respect and a steady check in this refinery

You will miss the green and the woods and streams and the dust will fill your nose

But you’ll be free, and just like me, an idiot, I suppose

(Maybe more on Stan Rogers coming soon, as I’ve lately gotten really into his music.)

A high-dynamic range photo of the Belle Fourche River as it flows by Devil's Tower in Wyoming, with green grass and blue sky contrasted with the red soil of the Spearfish Formation.

It didn’t turn out perfectly, but it’s still a striking, color-rich image, especially compared to what my camera took on automatic mode:

A normal, non-HDR photograph of the Belle Fourche River as it flows near Devil's Tower.

More importantly, it’s incredibly better than what my previous attempts at exposure-bracketing a shot and merging them into an HDR image (note: for people who were unclear, this is an example of a shot that DIDN’T work out):

A... colorful HDR image of Bear Butte Lake.

Compare that to the original (and yes, I’m aware I have a spot on my lens):

A normal, non-HDR picture of Bear Butte Lake.

I’m nothing more than an untrained amateur at photography, but I imagine that as I do more of this kind of stuff (and get better equipment, like a DSLR that can do Auto Exposure Bracketing instead of me having to do it manually) there’s some real potential here.

The article, and Blow, were rife with criticisms that almost all video games today are “juvenile, silly, and intellectually lazy.” Blow’s work, first the time-bending platformer “Braid” and now his upcoming puzzle-solving adventure game “Witness,” was presented as a new, more intelligent alternative.

Granting, for a moment, the partially true but incredibly overbroad premise about modern video games, Taylor Clark is certainly right about “Braid.” A game that at first appears to be a simple “Super Mario Bros.” clone turns out to be so much more. While you run around a world filled with platforms, obstacles and waddling monsters, jumping to avoid and squash them, that’s only the game’s most basic mechanic. In addition to controlling your character’s motions, like any of thousands of platformers since Mario, you also control time.

Even the early ability to rewind time to correct your mistakes transforms the gaming experience, allowing far harder challenges because failure isn’t permanent. Later Blow gives the player far more control over time, from one level where when you rewind time your past self persists as a shadow, leaving you able to do two things at once, to another where time and space are intertwined. Move right across the screen and time advances; move left and time retreats.

All of that isn’t even counting what Clark focuses on: the game’s intellectual subtext, with artsy asynchronous journal entries chronically what at first seems a stereotypical pursuit of a kidnapped princess. The brilliant final level of “Braid” totally inverts this premise, but of course Blow’s shooting higher than that, intending the pursuit of the girl as a metaphor for (simply) the atomic bomb and (more complex) the general pitfalls in the pursuit of knowledge.

To use terms I’ve used before, “Braid” is a game that’s both clever (innovative mechanics) and intelligent (rich, thought-provoking subtext).

But, and getting around to the point, I’m not convinced that “Witness” is equally groundbreaking.

Clark’s article leaves it abundantly clear that the game is intelligent. The audio messages left around the game’s world have little to do with advancing the plot and everything to do with communicating some “intensely personal” thoughts of Blow’s:

In one, the narrator speaks of his lonely childhood in 1970s California; he recalls that every recess, he played alone on a tire swing, closing his eyes and fantasizing that “someday, Just the Right Girl would see me there, eyes still closed; she would walk out there to the tire swing, saying nothing, and she would kiss me lightly … I waited, but this never happened.” In another log, he describes the emotional pain he felt upon beginning to go bald at age 20, and how today “a peninsula of hair juts outward, angled toward the left side of my face.” Perhaps the most striking entry begins like this: “I could have done anything with my life, but somehow I ended up designing puzzles, not least of which are these, here on this island.”

I pivoted away from the monitor to look at the man on the sofa—face bathed in the glow of his laptop, widow’s peak veering slightly to the left—and realized with a start that I was wandering around inside Blow’s own mind.

The game is a “nonsequential fictional framework that stretches the very idea of narrative in an interactive medium”; it’s “really about two things: it’s about Jon Blow, and it’s about the meaning of life.”

It’s always impressive when a game tries to communicate on an artistic level, rather than just providing visceral thrills, so my hat’s off to Blow for his ambition.

In terms of gameplay, though, “Witness” seems not so much a revolution as “Braid” was, but an incremental iteration of a genre of games stretching back to its clear parent, “Myst.”

You’re stuck on an abandoned island with no threats and no time limit, just a bunch of puzzles to solve, through observation of minute details in a rich, immersive world. It was really fun when I played that in 1993.

I’m not saying this denigrate “Witness”, which seems like a fun and creative game that certainly brings some new things to the table. Its central mechanic involves tracing patterns, not simply clicking in the right places like so many adventure-puzzle games, and the puzzles can be fiendishly difficult.

Out in a small orchard, you come across a set of puzzle screens situated in front of a series of apple trees. One pattern, where a single line fans out into multiple forks, replicates itself at each station and you’re left to figure out what tracing path will solve the puzzle. It isn’t until you look around that you notice a single apple on a branch of each of the trees near the screens. The branching pattern of the trees roughly matches the one on the screen. A little bit of trial and error and you’re able to solve the puzzle. This made a tiny vibration of wonder work up my spine. How did I figure that out? It just kind of… happened.

The puzzles aren’t simply hard for the sake of being hard, but conceptually difficult and rewarding:

Blow wants the point of The Witness to be the act of noticing, of paying attention to one’s surroundings. Speaking about it, he begins to sound almost like a Zen master. “Things are pared down to the basic acts of movement and observation until those senses become refined,” he told me. “The further you go into the game, the more it’s not even about the thinking mind anymore—it becomes about the intuitive mind.”

The game, in other words, is surely innovative. But hold the hosannas — Jonathan Blow has already shown us what a revolutionary game looks like, and “Witness” doesn’t seem to be it.

I speak, of course, of the spoiler — learning something before you wanted to know it, in a way that ruins the pleasure of the journey.

After all, when we consume fiction, we don’t just want a summary of the plot. You don’t get the same thrill reading a Wikipedia plot summary as you do letting it unfold. We like to enjoy the moments as they unfold, to discover twists and turns when the author intended, not all at once.

For example, I’ve never seen M. Night Shymalan’s “The Sixth Sense.” Why bother? I learned about the movie’s twist well before I even considered seeing the movie. I’d probably still enjoy watching it, but losing the thrill of figuring it out has sapped any motivation to go out and go see it. And in a world where there’s always another entertainment option, that’s a death knell.

I don’t want to speak too broadly here. There are some cases where some people like spoilers. Some people get very wrapped up in characters’ fates and want to know what’s going to happen. In this case the impact-sapping quality of the spoiler serves as a defense mechanism: When you’re trying not to be traumatized by a characters’ death, knowing that they will or won’t die in advance lets you soften the blow and enjoy the unfolding plot without being consumed by dread. This isn’t a situation I usually find myself in, but I begrudgingly respect those who do. (That, of course, doesn’t mean I won’t tease them for being a spoilsport — pun intended.)

But this is an increasing problem. Unlike in the past, when everyone watched movies and television shows at the same time, home video and online streaming let us watch movies and TV shows months or years after their release. Avoiding spoilers isn’t just a job of a few weeks any more.

The website CollegeHumor recently put together a group of TV actors to address — amusingly, of course — the concept of spoilers and spoiler etiquette:

Some jokes about rock-paper-scissors, knife-fights and speaking privileges aside, that’s actually a pretty reasonable set of guidelines. Basically, the responsibility for not spoiling others falls on the person with the spoiling knowledge — at first. People are allowed to spoil themselves, but at their own risk. People in possession of a spoiler should give their friends and companions a respectable amount of time before spoiling things: two weeks for an ordinary TV episode, two months for a season finale, and a full year for a series finale. (The video doesn’t address movies or books, but a general rule of thumb should apply: be respectful.)

Of course, not all fiction is equally spoiler-prone. It’s a question of how serialized a television show is. A show with little or no serialization — where every episode is self-contained and nothing significant changes — is much safer here. Knowing that there’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer rides a skateboard off the edge of a gorge might spoil the ending of that episode, but it doesn’t impact the viewing of any of the other 500+ Simpsons episodes, because The Simpsons‘ episodic nature returns to the status quo ante almost every time. But knowing the identities of the cylons on Battlestar Gallactica matters considerably more, because as a serialized show the discovery of one secret can change everything.

As a matter of principle, I’m firmly against spoilers. (So don’t tell me who the cylons are— I haven’t seen the series yet and intend to!) But I’m also an informavore who finds it very hard to avoid spoiling myself, especially since I tend to watch TV shows almost exclusively long after their airdate.

As CollegeHumor’s video notes, “viewers should seek out information online at the own risk. A spoiler alert is considerate, but should be no means be expected.” That’s followed by a woman exclaiming in disappointment, “Seriously?! I just wanted his dog’s name.”

All that rings true to my experience. While watching Arrested Development — a serialized comedy — last year, I routinely uncovered spoilers about future developments when reading episode pages on Wikipedia, which thoroughly and semi-obnoxiously detailed each and every way a given episode foreshadowed later episodes. After a few times, I forced myself to stop, but it was in many cases too late. Similarly, while watching the serialized drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately, I’ve managed to spoil most of the significant series developments for myself through a combination of Wikipedia, retrospective episode reviews and general cultural zeitgeist. (For example, I know the show runs seven seasons as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” so clearly the character of Buffy isn’t going away. And I know the character Angel gets his own spinoff, so any sense of menace for his character’s fate is largely gone as well.)

And yet a series can still be enjoyable even when spoiled. When the enjoyability of a piece of fiction DEPENDS on surprising viewers with a twist, it can be gimmicky. Well-done fiction is enjoyable even if the twists have been spoiled, even if ideally you’d have discovered them the way the creator intended. After all, I still enjoy the show Game of Thrones immensely even though I’ve read the novels the show is based on and so basically know everything that will happen. Now, in that case, I still discovered the twists largely* the way the original author, George R.R. Martin, intended, so I experienced all the emotional swings rather than uncovering things from a plot summary. But even in cases where I was genuinely spoiled — like discovering the “Big Bads” for most Buffy seasons before getting to the twists where Joss Whedon reveals them to the audience — I still liked watching events unfold.

I’ve sometimes wished I could compartmentalize my memory and experience something brand new — to watch the Lord of the Rings movies from the perspective of someone who’s never read J.R.R. Tolkien, as opposed to someone like myself who’s very familiar with his work. But in the absence of such magic, we simply have to make do — keep unwanted spoilers to a minimum, be courteous to others who also want to avoid being spoiled, and try to enjoy things as they come.

*I was not always so strict about spoilers. As a kid I had a habit of starting book series in the middle — as, in fact, I did with Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series on which Game of Thrones is based. I first read book two, “A Clash of Kings,” which opens with a bunch of people reacting to the death of a significant character from the first book — a character who meant nothing to me until I went back and read Book 1. I did this semi-regularly, and eventually seem to have gotten sufficiently annoyed by it to become diligent about consuming things in the proper order with minimal spoilers.

The story’s gotten seemingly everywhere the past week, but briefly: 85-year-old, semi-retired Marilyn Hagerty wrote a review of the new Olive Garden restaurant in her home town of Grand Forks for the Grand Forks Herald. The review was straightforward and unassuming, praising things like the “Tuscan farmhouse style,” the busy kitchen staff and the “warm and comfortable” chicken Alfredo.

Then, as Joe Posnanski put it, the Internet exploded.

Hagerty’s review was passed around on social networks — 40,000 shares on Twitter and Facebook combined just from the Herald’s widgets. (Also 138 plus-ones on Google+, but that’s a different post.) Bastions of Internet culture like Fark.com and Redding linked to the review with snarky commentary, such as this representative headline Fark gave it:

Residents of Grand Forks, ND are lining up for blocks to enjoy a one-of-a-kind European dining experience that finally puts the city on the culinary map with its unique brand of Tuscan refinery. It’s called “The Olive Garden”

The Herald put its finger on the source of the humor in its coverage of its new viral star: “residents of more metropolitan areas found it amusing that a chain restaurant would be reviewed. In larger markets, newspaper reviews are reserved for exclusive, high-end eateries that offer fine dining.”

Of course, as Hagerty pointed out to the Village Voice, “If you were going to review the fine dining here, you’d be done in three weeks — there’s only about three places you could call ‘fine dining.’” Having lived and worked in a town even smaller and more remote than Grand Forks for several years, this practical defense of the Hagerty review is definitely spot-on.

But don’t stop there. The reaction — and counter-reaction — to Hagerty’s review shine a spotlight on the Death of Sincerity.

It’s one of the most striking features of modern Internet-based culture, the culture of a young, urban and tech-savvy base that in many ways dominates national discourse.

In this culture, almost nothing is taken seriously. Irony is the dominant mode of communication, and coolness lies in a detached reserve. If someone seems too earnest about something, it’s grounds for mockery and parody. Look at Fark’s reaction to Hagerty’s review. If someone from the Internet generation wanted to gush about Olive Garden, they’d phrase it like this: “I love the Olive Garden un-ironically.” This is a culture in which ironic discourse is so pervasive you have apologetically point it out when you step away from irony and say what you actually mean.

Our preferred superheroes are dark and brooding, not bright and earnest.

I speak about Internet culture clinically, but of course I’m by-and-large a full participant in it. I’m plugged into social media, I check Fark regularly, I read sites like Gawker and The Daily What. Irony and detachment are my constant companions.

But the reports of sincerity’s death are somewhat exaggerated. Though it can sometimes seem otherwise when you spend so much time online and talking with other people who spend lots of time online, vast swathes of America aren’t a part of this culture of irony. If the base of Internet culture is young, urban and tech-savvy, then it’s correspondingly weakest among the old, rural and analog among us.

Living in South Dakota — certainly older and more rural than the country at large — the past four years has been a constant reminder of this dichotomy. I particularly recall interviewing a South Dakota politician who had recorded his own patriotic country song at a studio in Nashville. Full of earnest devotion, stirring instrumentation, an extended quote from the Declaration of Independence and harmonizing backup singers, it seemed at first blush to be amazingly corny. But that was the irony talking. Finding that anthem’s earnest sincerity corny was like marveling at what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Paris. It’s a different culture. A different language.

This divide, between a culture of sincerity and a culture of irony, maps out along a lot of the other faultlines in what’s been called the Culture War. But just like the other battlegrounds of the Culture War, things aren’t quite cut and dry. Most people inhabit the cultural borderlands, partaking of both sincerity and irony. Wouldn’t it be absurd to be otherwise? Even in the most conservative, rural parts of America, people who always say what they mean and never play with words are unusual. And even in the hearts of Brooklyn or San Francisco, latte-sipping hipsters have things they love un-ironically.

While Marilyn Hagerty is unapologetically earnest, her son, Wall Street Journal reporter James Hagerty, translates her sincerity for people not up on her “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” approach: ”She doesn’t like to say anything bad about the food. Her regular readers read between the lines. If she writes more about the décor than the food, you might want to eat somewhere else.”

Hagerty’s Olive Garden review talked a lot about the décor.

Joe Posnanski, one of the most web-savvy columnists writing, noted the pull of both sides:

I want to live in a world where someone in Grand Forks or anyplace else can enjoy the Olive Garden. I want to live in a world where people can like things unconditionally, without irony, without sarcasm.

Sure, I know: It’s the Olive Garden. I get the joke. And, hey, I enjoy poking fun at the Olive Garden’s excesses as much as the next person…

Sure enough, when Posnanski ate at an Olive Garden, post-Hagerty, he ran into a patron gushing enthusiastically about the Olive Garden chicken.”It would be easy to jab at that sort of euphoria over Olive Garden chicken, and it might be funny too… But snark wasn’t how I felt. Instead, I felt happy.”

I’m not broadly read enough to draw a bigger picture about this cultural battle of snark vs. earnest. Is the rise of irony a reaction to the socioeconomic dislocations of the Internet economy, much how the Industrial Revolution two centuries earlier sparked reactions and counter-reactions like Romanticism, Idealism and the precursors of Existentialism? It seems plausible, even compelling, but I’m speculating. Still, it’s facile to suggest that sincerity is going to die, that it’s a movement of the past and is going to be replaced by the new, ironic viewpoint of the young as generational change does its inexorable work. Some combination of factors has sparked this new culture — and who knows what the next culture will be? So it’s probably worthwhile to keep a foot in both camps — to retain the ability to mock the Olive Garden while still appreciating people who don’t.

That’s the argument today over a new comic (sNSF) by Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal. The frequently provocative Inman sets his sights on the question of media piracy by presenting a hypothetical case of a young man who wants to watch the HBO series “Game of Thrones.”

Inman’s character, a well-meaning sort, listens to the angel on his left shoulder who urges him to pay for the show instead of pirating it. But Mr. Oatmeal (as I’ll call him), credit card in hand, finds he can’t buy the show on iTunes, he can’t buy it on Amazon, he can’t watch it on the Netflix or Hulu subscriptions he pays for, and he can’t even watch it on HBO’s own website. Giving in to his demon-on-the-right-shoulder, Mr. Oatmeal visits a shady website, downloads a torrent, and is quickly watching direwolves, horse lords and the “Douchiest. Prince. EVER.”

This argument is the moderate “piracy’s not bad” argument. (The radical pro-piracy argument says piracy is a good thing, because charging for information is wrong.) Piracy, the moderate argument goes, isn’t a good thing. But good people who are willing to pay for content are DRIVEN to piracy when antiquated content-providers put roadblocks in their way. If these companies would just let us get our content through simple, one-click purchases, piracy would wither away. Look at what happened to music piracy when iTunes came around, they say — sure, some people still pirate songs, but those are the irreconcilables. Reasonable people want to be able to buy TV shows and movies the way they buy music.

It’s a reasonably persuasive argument. Note that saying media companies should make their content more convenient because it’s (an intrinsic) good for the viewers and also is (an instrumental) good for the media companies because it will mean more pirates buying their content instead is not the same as encouraging people to pirate stuff — and I think Inman stays just on the “you shouldn’t pirate” side of the line. He’s not saying people should pirate, he’s saying they will as long as it’s hard for them to get the content they want.

But a persuasive argument is not a self-evident argument. Take the reaction from tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, who is sympathetic to Inman’s broader point about content being easier to get. But Ihnatko also takes aim at the person who torrents when they can’t get what they want easily:

You want to see what the hubbub around “Game Of Thrones” is about? Cool. The show is produced by HBO and it’s available exclusively on that channel. It’s a premium channel and any cable provider can sell you a monthly subscription.

HBO’s awesome. They have a streaming app that will allow you to watch pretty much any original series or movie that they still have the rights to (including “Thrones”), and it works with almost everything you’d ever want to stream video to. HBO doesn’t even charge for the app or for the extra access.

You say you don’t want to subscribe to HBO, or even cable?

Ah. Well, no worries. The show will be released on DVD and Blu-ray later in the year.

You’re not into physical media? I’m with you. It’ll be on iTunes soon. See? The store page lists the release date. March 6. You can circle it on the calendar and everything.

You’re still frowning. What’s wrong, Scrumpkin?

Oh. You want it right now.

The person who torrents because they can’t get the content conveniently and right away, Ihnatko says, is just betraying a juvenile inability to delay gratification. Think about how new the ability to jump on a Netflix and watch a streaming episode of a TV show, on demand, is. Or jump a little further back in time, when even being able to watch something on a DVD or VHS wasn’t around — the only way you could watch a TV episode was at the time set aside by the network. And here we are breaking the law because we can’t wait a few weeks or months to be able to purchase something?

Also a persuasive argument.

But the real point I wanted to make is from piece written not this week but over a decade ago, by the late humorist and author Douglas Adams. Writing in Wired in 1998 about the coming effects of the Internet on publishing, Adams notes that “lots of people are not in the business you think they’re in”:

Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programs to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers. (This is why the BBC has such a schizophrenic time – it’s actually in a different business from all its competitors).

(Emphasis added.)

Take Inman’s particular example of “Game of Thrones.” HBO is not in the business of providing programming to viewers. It is in the business of persuading viewers to pay a monthly fee to subscribe to their channel. Any money HBO gets by persuading people to pay for a DVD (or iTunes download) of their shows is pure bonus. And, importantly, if HBO makes it TOO easy for people to get the content you can only otherwise get by subscribing, then people will stop subscribing. And even the financial reward from selling their content may not be enough — HBO doesn’t just want you to subscribe to watch “Game of Thrones,” they want to then get you to watch “Luck” and “True Blood” and “Boardwalk Empire” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” so you subscribe all year. And then ideally ALSO buy the DVDs of the shows you like.

On the other hand, a network like the U.S. broadcast networks has more incentive to make their content broadly available. They get their money from advertisers, so if people are watching a show on Hulu or Netflix or DVD or iTunes, that means fewer advertisers and thus lower rates — but this can be recouped by getting people to pay $2 or $3 or $5 an episode for something they would have watched for free. That’s because there’s less of — pardon the pun — a “network effect.” Yes, CBS and ABC and NBC and FOX want people to sit down and watch their network straight-through, all evening, but in these days of channel-flipping they don’t count on it. At most a show gets a lead-in effect, by inheriting the viewers of the popular show preceding it.

The situation is even clearer for movies, who (correct me if I’m wrong) are in the business not of selling subscriptions or advertising but selling tickets. To the extent that movie studios can get someone to pay to watch their movie in one form of another, it’s simply a matter of setting things up to maximize their profit from their movie. And, in fact, you read about movie studies trying things like releasing a movie on-demand shortly after it hits theaters. The resistance they hit comes from the movie theaters, who are generally speaking not in the business of selling movie tickets but in the business of selling popcorn, candy and soft drinks to movie-goers. If a customer watches a movie on demand instead of in a theater, the studio still gets its money, but the theater loses out.

So Inman probably picked a bad example with “Game of Thrones.” However much the consumer (I among them) might want HBO to make their programming easy to purchase à la carte, that’s antithetical to HBO’s business interests. HBO wants there to be one way to watch their content: subscribing to HBO. Now, if you do that, then you get access to HBOGo, which lets you stream their shows on demand. But you don’t get the convenience unless you pay your toll to HBO.

(There’s a bigger question about whether this is a sustainable business model for HBO in light of changing technology and consumer habits. I don’t pretend to be able to answer this.)

Remember: it all comes down to money. It costs money to produce content. So how do you extract enough money from consumers of that content to pay for it, plus a little on the top? There’s more than one way to skin that cat — more than one business two otherwise identical content producers can be in — and some of these business models may be friendlier to consumers than others. Consumers have a right to complain when companies treat them poorly. But they shouldn’t demand that companies run themselves out of business just to make their own lives a little more convenient.

— Food for thought: The proposed Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar would replace our current calendar — jury-rigged to fit the unequal revolution and rotation of the Earth — with a fixed calendar, where every day of the year always falls on the same day of the week. Christmas would always be on a Sunday. Americans would always celebrate their independence on a Wednesday, while the French would do the same on a Saturday a week and a half later.

To equalize out the calendar, Hanke-Henry would add an extra week every five or six years.

Moreover, they’d also abolish time zones. All time would be UTC — so when it’s 0700 hours in London and the sun is coming up, it’s also 0700 in New York City but the middle of the night, and also 0700 in Honolulu — and the late evening. 0700 hours would always be evening in Honolulu, just as it would always be morning in London.

(It’s unclear how Hanke and Henry expect people to function — whether they want people to continue working 0900 to 1700 every day for synchronization, even if that means people in some parts of the world become nocturnal, or if they want people to continue setting their schedules largely by the sun but just calling it different times, or some combination of both.)

It’s a proposal that’s a big step towards the “rational” and away from the “natural,” and I’m not sold at all that it would be an improvement. But it’s at least thought-provoking.

— I’m ordinarily not one to be bothered by “RAS Syndrome” — the redundant use of a word with an acronym containing that word. Think “ATM machine” where ATM stands for “automatic teller machine.” Sure, I try not to use it because it’s not correct, but I’m not super detail-focused and generally can find better things to be annoyed about.

But I was struck the other day by a local sign advertising the sort of content people could get on their new HD TVs — content like “NFL Football” and “MLB Baseball.” Because I was watching this sign while sitting at a traffic light, I had a little bit of time to think, and was moderately surprised at how interesting I found such a relatively trivial question. On the most basic level, referring to “Major League Baseball baseball” is pure redundancy. The use of the term “Major League” before “Baseball” already distinguishes it from minor league baseball or foreign leagues like Nippon Professional Baseball. “National Football League Football” is a little better, if only because the repeated words aren’t right next to each other, but the second “football” is still semantically useless since there’s no other sport playing in the National Football League.

And yet. Consider if you saw a sign advertising “MLL games.” Would you know what that was? Probably not. Without Googling it, I might not guess that stands for Major League Lacrosse. So that’s not a very useful acronym. It would be better to write the whole thing out: “Major League Lacrosse games.” But if you’ve only got a small sign, you might not have room for four words totaling 24 letters. Would writing “MLL Lacrosse” be such a sin? (Well, actually, in this case, the ideal solution would probably be to write “Pro Lacrosse” since the difference between Major League Lacrosse and, say, the National Lacrosse League probably isn’t important for people the same way knowing whether you’re going to a major league baseball game or a single-A minor league baseball game would be. But this is just an example, because no one is selling TVs by one’s ability to watch professional lacrosse matches on them.)

Now, the MLB, the NFL, the NBA and even the NHL are not as obscure as lacrosse leagues. I would imagine even most Americans who don’t follow sports could identify that “NBA” means basketball, for example. Those who can’t probably aren’t going to be sold on a new TV by its capacity to show team sporting events. But does the added clarity of the redundant word outweigh the redundancy even when the acronym is well-known?

It goes without saying that “Actually, it’s more complicated than that” is practically my motto. But I’ve wasted enough pixels on this.

— It’s not a movie that would ordinarily arouse more than passing curiosity from me, but I have to admit I’m reasonably excited about the upcoming sci-fi/superhero movie “Chronicle.” Its basic synopsis: three teens get telekinetic powers and struggle with the moral implications of their newfound power. Nothing complicated. The basic story goes back at least to Plato’s Ring of Gyges. Added on top of that is a conceit or gimmick: it’s a “found footage” movie, à la “Paranormal Activity,” where everything you’re seeing on screen was supposed recorded by a participant in or observer of the film’s action. In addition to a movie-making-obsessed main character, “Chronicle” apparently also uses things like security camera footage to provide extra angles and information.

So far I’m still at “passing curiosity” stage. Here’s the trailer:

Seems reasonably well-crafted, as much as you can tell from a two-minute montage. And it’s getting good — even great — reviews so far. With six in so far on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s still 100 percent positive, with Empire even gushing that it’s “a stunning superhero/sci-fi that has appeared out of nowhere to demand your immediate attention.” Moreover, what could have been a cheap gimmick — the “found footage” conceit — seems to largely be effective thanks to some creative implementation by the filmmakers. If you can make it work, an effective conceit makes something all the more impressive.

Good reviews are usually enough to pique my interest. But what’s put me over the top is its unoriginality. The movie’s got some striking similarities to a webcomic I read a while back called “FreakAngels,” about a band of 12 young men and women granted psychic powers but not necessarily the maturity to wield them appropriately. Even though “FreakAngels” takes place mostly in a post-apocalyptic future (which the titular characters just MAY have brought about) it also includes some flashbacks to their adolescence, as super-powered teens on the run from the Man.

Watch the “Chronicle” trailer, especially the action climax from around 1:30 to 1:50. It looks like this screenshot:

A screenshot from the "Chronicle" trailer

Then check out these two excerpts from FreakAngels (warning: the second one is a bit bloody):

FreakAngels copyright 2012 Warren Ellis. www.freakangels.com

FreakAngels copyright 2012 Warren Ellis. www.freakangels.com

So while “FreakAngels” goes more for the R while “Chronicle” apparently got toned down to a PG-13, they’re both treading some similar ground — and it’s good ground to trod, rich in archetypes and fundamental questions of what it means to be human. If “Chronicle” were poorly executed (and despite the promising signs it could still turn out to be a dud) I might feel annoyed that something I like was ripped off (not that there was necessarily any direct inspiration). As it is, they’re more like two great song covers — sure, you’ve heard it before, but not quite in this way, and sometimes the cover eclipses the original. (And they’re both covers, of course, since neither one was on wholly original ground, or at least not if you limit your analysis to their similarities.)

— Speaking of upcoming good movies, it’s looking like a surprisingly good year for film. Already the January doldrums have given us “The Grey” and “Haywire” along with Oscar-bait prestige projects expanding to wide release. I can’t speak for the under-the-radar indie films, but just talking promising popcorn clicks, upcoming we’ve got “Chronicle,” the real-SEAL-starring “Act of Valor,” “The Hunger Games,” a new Aardman Studios animation in “The Pirates!”, the Joss Whedon-helmed “Avengers” movie, a new “Men in Black” film, the better of the two upcoming Snow White films in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” the alternate history/horror schlockfest “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” Pixar’s “Brave,” Christopher Nolan’s final Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” a high-concept sci-fi time-travel movie in “Looper,” the new James Bond movie “Skyfall,” Peter Jackson’s long-awaited “Hobbit” movie, Kathryn Bigelow’s still-untitled Osama bin Laden movie, Brad Pitt’s adaptation of the modern zombie classic “World War Z,” and the “serious” Abraham Lincoln movie, “Lincoln.”

As a fan of literature, I rarely root for a film adaptation to make wholesale changes to a beloved book. And yet strangely, for among my most-beloved books, those of J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m in the position cheering for major changes to plot, theme and tone in the upcoming adaptations of “The Hobbit.”

I was a huge fan of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” both books and movies. Peter Jackson’s movies took a lot of liberties with the books, generally focusing more on action than the often meandering travelogue of Tolkien’s prose, and cutting out sequences both extraneous (Tom Bombadil) and cool but probably unworkable (the Scourging of the Shire). Characters were tweaked and plots rearranged, with battle sequences extended far beyond Tolkien’s brief descriptions and characters given extra adventures and conflict.

While some purists complained, I largely didn’t mind. For the better part of four years I obsessed over the films, tracking news as they were shot and produced and then watching them multiple times, in theaters and on DVD, after release.

But anyone who thought Peter Jackson’s adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” played fast and loose with the original had better hurry up and hook up a dynamo in Wolvercote Cemetery, because Professor Tolkien is about to be spinning madly in his grave.

“The Hobbit,” Tolkien’s first novel, was written as a children’s story, and it shows. For most of the book, the tone is light and fanciful, with the main characters bickering and singing and getting into trouble and out again without much more to show from it than a little discomfort. Tricks solve most of the obstacles the titular hobbit Bilbo Baggins and his companions face, not force of arms, and all the main characters except Gandalf are marked by varying degrees of folly.

When “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” arrives in theaters in December 2012, viewers will not see a film for children. Instead, they’re likely to see something more akin to the adult “Lord of the Rings” movies Jackson directed a decade ago. Compared to the novel, the tone will be grittier and the action more violent. Moreover, massive sections of plot not in the novels will make up the film, filling in the gaps around the adventure wherein Bilbo Baggins finds a magical ring and a dragon’s treasure. In the book, the wizard Gandalf disappears for long chunks of the novel, pursuing other schemes; we readers only learn what he’s up to at the very end of the book. In films, Jackson will reportedly cut back and forth, showing the struggle of Gandalf and others against the Necromancer of Mirkwood while Bilbo and his companions trudge east towards the Lonely Mountain. (This is why “The Hobbit” is going to be two movies, not one.)

I don’t mind this. It’s a little disappointing that the production of “The Hobbit” won’t be the great children’s movie it could be, but in doing so I fully expect Jackson to produce a worthy companion to his epic “Lord of the Rings.”

Earlier this year, I wasn’t so sure.

In my mind, the biggest unknown — and biggest concern — about Jackson’s “Hobbit” adaptation was how he would handle the characters who set off with Bilbo on the quest to slay the dragon Smaug: 13 dwarves.

This was cause for concern for a number of reasons. For one, simple logistics. Thirteen is a LOT of characters to introduce and develop. I knew Tolkien novices who couldn’t keep the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring straight, and they were all different shapes and sizes — dwarves, elves, hobbits, humans, and wizards.

The company of Thorin Oakenshield are all dwarves. That means they’re all short, stocky and bearded, generally hard-working but proud. Even in the novel, Tolkien didn’t spend a lot of time giving the dwarves individual personalities. There was Thorin, the leader (and most competent); Bombur, the fat dwarf; Balin, the kindly, older dwarf; Fili and Kili, the younger dwarves — and then they start to blend together.

That worked in a children’s book. But in a movie that’s ostensibly a prequel to the epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the dwarves would swiftly become a laughingstock. The dwarves will provide plenty of comedy, that’s for sure — much of it is written into the plot, and in the Lord of the Rings Jackson used the dwarf Gimli as his go-to comic relief source. Comedy, though, can’t be their raison-d’être.

And I wasn’t certain that Peter Jackson would successfully steer the dwarves away from comic relief. That was my second concern — Jackson’s increasing misuse of the dwarf Gimli in the Lord of the Rings. In the first Lord of the Rings movie, Gimli provided some laughs by virtue of his fierce pride. But over the next two films, that pride slowly became less noble and more clownish, as Gimli has Aragorn toss him into battle, hops up and down because he can’t see over the Helm’s Deep battlements, and (worst of all!) loses a drinking contest to Legolas, the graceful elf warrior to whom Gimli was increasingly relegated to being a foil.

This galled me because as a fantasy reader I’ve always been a fan of dwarves. This was and is distinctly a minority opinion — by far the most popular fantasy race are the elves. Graceful, beautiful, intelligent, skilled craftspeople and artists, lovers and defenders of nature, it’s no wonder so many fantasy fans love elves. (Just look at Tolkien. The great philologist invented two distinct elven languages, but didn’t even fully flesh out his one dwarven tongue.) Dwarves, in contrast, are stubborn, gruff, hand-working, greedy, insular, clannish, and prone to being the architects of their own destruction. (Dwarves ALWAYS delve too deep…) Instead of living in verdant forests, they carve out their homes in caves. And then there’s the beards — dwarves all have them.* Things may have been different in the mid-19th Century, but this day and age, people consistently express aesthetic preference for clean-shaven men.

*All dwarf men have them, at any rate. The question of dwarf women is one that fantasy world-builders can’t agree on. In some versions, dwarf women are bearded just like the men. In others, dwarves share the human trait of women not growing facial hair. In either case, it’s rarely an issue because of all the fantasy races, dwarves are the most male-centric in their portrayal. This is one of the less attractive aspects of dwarves.

Elves are perfect. Dwarves decidedly imperfect. It seems no contest.

And yet, it’s the imperfections that make them so compelling. Angels are boring; watching people with flaws, who make bad decisions, is where real drama comes in. Dwarves make incredible things — whole cities carved out of the insides of mountains, weapons and crafts of surpassing beauty, mines tunneling deep into the earth with medieval technology. But in true dramatic fashion, it’s their very greatest gifts that prove their downfall. The accumulated wealth from dwarf craftsmanship lures raiders, none deadlier than the great dragons who, like Smaug of “The Hobbit,” pillage dwarf strongholds and seize their treasure. And their deep mines awake fell powers like Moria’s Balrog, which rise up from the depths to wreak havoc. Even in the best case scenario, when the dwarves don’t die, they inevitably turn inward and cut their underground cities off from the rest of the world.

I once heard a shorthand description of the classical genres of comedy and drama. In a comedy, everyone gets married at the end. In a drama, everyone dies at the end. (Which you laugh at more is a matter of taste…) Well, in this sense, elves are comedy. Dwarves are drama. The elves fall in love and have parties and eventually get bored and sail off into the sunset. Dwarves all die, or bury themselves in the earth — cursed from the start by the very things that make them distinct.

A monument to this conception of dwarves is the esoteric computer game Dwarf Fortress. This is a simulation game where you control a colony of dwarves and guide them to carve out a city from the mountains, mine for precious materials, and fight off enemies from goblins to dragons. The game is infamous for having perhaps the steepest learning curve ever — what passes for graphics in Dwarf Fortress are simply ASCII characters spilling over the page, like the screen of text from “The Matrix.” But like “The Matrix,” if you stare at the text long enough, the jumble of symbols begins to take on meaning — this letter “d” is a dog, that solid tan block is a rock wall, that cross is a gate. It’s not a game for the faint of heart. (For a look at the game and the philosophy behind it, read this New York Times Magazine article.)

The second thing Dwarf Fortress is infamous for is its difficulty curve. Most computer games you play to win. In Dwarf Fortress, that’s not going to happen. In true dwarven fashion, every dwarf fortress inevitably collapses. If dragons or demons from the deeps or orcish armies don’t crush the fortress, the ordinary feuds and conflicts of your growing society will lead to civil war, or your population will outstrip its food supply and mass famine sets in.  The game’s unofficial motto is “Losing is fun” — you’re going to lose, so you might as well lose amusingly.

Fans of the game have posted all sorts of recaps and summaries of their adventures that capture this spirit. For an accessible look at the spirit of the game, take a look at Bronzemurder, a dwarf city that an artist illustrated so you don’t have to pore through the Matrix to follow along. The basic story of Bronzemurder is a small, thriving fortress gets slaughtered in a comedy of errors by a slumbering monster awoken by an engineering flaw in the fortress’ water pump system. It’s tragic and morbidly hilarious and even a little uplifting at the same time — and that’s what dwarves are about.

But is the same filmmaker who brought us Gimli the clown going to capture that spirit when tasked with an adventuring party of 13 dwarves? I didn’t think so until Jackson released pictures of his dwarf characters to the world this summer:

The twelve supporting dwarf characters from Peter Jackson's upcoming "The Hobbit" films. Image from http://www.geektown.co.uk/2011/07/16/see-12-dwarves-from-the-hobbit/.

The first thing that does is satisfy my worry about the dwarves being distinguished. Yes, plenty of people will still have trouble keeping them straight because there’s a lot of them. But this isn’t going to be 13 Gimli clones wandering around. You’ve got dwarves with axes, dwarves with hammers, dwarves with swords and dwarves with polearms. Some are fat, some are thin. Some old, some young. Some have a working class demeanor, others a noble bearing. Some have long, flowing beards, others neatly trimmed beards or goatees. (One appears to just have a five-o’clock-shadow, which I’m not the biggest fan of, but whatever.) Just from the visual design, their character traits come through — this one is bookish and shy, that one old and wise, this one a badass warrior, that one a slightly odd duck.

And that more or less allays my secondary concern. From this one photo, you’ve got more thought put into character background than Gimli got in three whole films. These are characters with history, with personalities. You’ve got, in other words, great building blocks for a movie in these characters. Now, the script could do great things with them, or mediocre. But Peter Jackson is starting in the right spot, and it’s a lot harder to end up in the wrong spot with a good start. He had to deviate from Tolkien to get there, but seeing these images makes me confident that “The Hobbit” will live up to the spirit of the Lord of the Rings movies I love so much.

The first “Hobbit” movie will be released in December 2012. The first trailer for the movie premieres in from of the Jackson-produced “The Adventures of Tintin” tomorrow.