The Misadventures of Quinxy von Besiex truths, lies, and everything in between

The quote unquote N word.

New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney recently caught hell for using the N word (the full word) while recounting to a reporter a phone call she'd received. I don't think I've ever heard of a case before where people were outraged at someone accurately quoting another person, so long as they were presenting the quote in a negative light.  Despite the vile nature of the word, and the strong preference I and others would have to see the word neutered when quoted, out of respect, it seems to me unreasonable to cast the quoter in the same light as the quoted.  Read about Maloney Apologizing.

Besiex launches “Spirit Board”, a Ouija app

Early last week our new iPhone app "Spirit Board" went live in the iTunes app store.  This first free version has already been downloaded about 4,000 times, gotten 125 reviews (average rating of 2.5 stars, which isn't actually bad).  And according to Apptism, we're the 69th most popular app right now (which seems oddly high, but I'll believe it because I want to).  Try it out and rate us well, please!   We're launching a new version soon with many improvements.

My Favorites (iPhone app): Flight Control & Fantastic Contraption

My favorite iPhone games this week  Flight Control and Fantastic Contraption.

Flight Control is in a sense the perfect game.  The game is elegantly simple, a beautiful less is more.  Take away anything and the game would suffer, add anything and the game would suffer.  I generally prefer the complicated, it feels deeper, richer, more real, but rare gems like this come along and show me there is another way, perhaps a better way (at least in moments)...

Fantastic Contraption is a physics puzzle game, but unlike others I've tried which give you too little, this gives you just enough.  You can make elegantly complicated machines with connecting rods and driven and non-driven wheels.  And what's most impressive about this little game as a platform is that there's a level editor built in, and the ability to share and download levels other people have created.  After a few hours of play my machines are getting more and more complex in surprising ways, and I can begin to suspect just how fiendishly clever they may become as I learn and re-use the building concepts I'm discovering.

My Brain: The Movie

I woke up yesterday morning with a terrible case of ennui. Another day of work in the daytime, and socializing in the evening. I called my friend Angela to see if she was working. She was at work, she's a radiology tech, but they didn't have any patients that morning and they were just killing time running tests on the MRI machine. So, she invited me over and offered to give me an MRI! Here it is! That's my brain.

My first Lubitsch (The Love Parade)

I'd been meaning to visit the The Silent Movie Theater and tonight was the perfect occasion, though oddly enough, not for a silent film.  The film was Ernst Lubitsch's first "talkie", The Love Parade (1929).  I'd never seen any of his films before but my friend was a big fan.

In this charming precursor to the Hollywood musical, the French dispatch a virile lothario (Maurice Chevalier) in the midst of a string of Parisian dalliances to penetrate the kingdom of Sylvania. He marries the mythical kingdom's Queen Louise I, deftly portrayed by a winsome, all-American Jeanette MacDonald in her film debut. However, the prince consort's refusal to uphold his marriage vows and "obey the queen" leads to difficulties. The pre-code romance (and Ernst Lubitsch's first "talkie") celebrates extravagance and l'amour, with all the marks of the silent-film era's legacy.

The film was quite a surprise, I'd been expecting to find it interesting for the novelty of it, but I hadn't expected to actually like it.  And I did.  Just as described, it was charming, and even 80 years on its humor hadn't dimmed.  My only complaint was that Jeanette MacDonald's singing was fairly operetic and thus (to my ears at least) a little painful in its range; it was so high and screechy I could barely make out any words.  There is a subplot with the Queen's maid and the Prince Consort's butler that is just great, mostly because of this one scene/song they did, "Let's be common" which you can see in this pair of YouTube videos.

The Love Parade - Butler/Maid Scene (skip to 6:50)

The Love Parade - Butler/Maid Scene (Part II)

Very cute, and normally I'm not one for musical theater.

Now to see what his other movies were about...

Spice up your conference calls

If you're like me sometimes you need to be in a conference call.  Today while emailing a friend I had a mildly inspired idea.  I would ask her to tell me about some crazy and short story that happened in her life and I would try to inject it into the conference call, as plausibly as I could, likely as an explanation for why we needed to do something, or if all else fails perhaps as something that recently happened to me and how that explains why we're late on something.  I'm waiting for her story, if I get it in time I'll try to use it in a conference call I have coming up in 45 minutes.

Quinxy

The Irony of the Shopping Cart

I was walking my dog to brunch yesterday and had a slightly profound though unfinished insight. I saw this homeless guy pushing a shopping car, and sadly that's nothing new, but I suddenly had this as yet incomplete epiphany related to how ironic it is that in our great capitalist democracy where shopping is king and key to our economy, those with no money, those living outside of that society also use shopping carts, and in a similar but different way, to move about the items they get for free. As I said, totally incomplete. It needs a bit of work to highlight and explore more of the parallelism between the uses by the homed and the homeless, and it needs some conclusions about what this all means... but if that work was done you could probably make a brilliant poem or short essay out of it.

What is not art?

In a discussion the other day with a friend the topic of "What is art?" came up.  I can't define what art is, but I have some definite opinions on what art isn't.

My basic rule of thumb is, if something was produced with no or low skill, with no or low intelligence, with high unguided randomness, and in little or no time, it's not "art".  (My alternate version of that rule is, if a monkey could produce a similar work in less than 24 hours of trying, it's not art.)  It may be pretty, it may be worth seeing, it may be worth buying, but it's not art in the same way that a sunset is not art, that a pretty rock is not art, that a cute dog is not art.

My company’s first iPhone app

Our first iPhone app has been submitted to Apple for the iPhone App Store. It's an homage to the 1981 arcade game Kick.  Rick Strom, my partner in Besiex, wrote this one in a week.  We're releasing a variation with update graphics in the next week, which should be even cooler.  We're just feeling out the iPhone marketplace to try to guage how much money and development time it makes sense to invest.