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GameWorks

ETS!,

There are many instances of rich corporations getting free advertising from the media by holding some sort of public relations event and then getting coverage equivalent to thousands of dollars of paid ads. A lot of the examples include Bill Gates related products. Remember when Windows 95 got on the cover of Newsweek and every newspaper in America? And that was just for a piece of software which in retrospect wasn't that great. Did they pay Newsweek to give them all these free column inches? How can the media justify not reporting all sorts of important news in order to create space for this hype?

There were several other instances where the Seattle Times gave Microsoft or other companies full page stories that functioned as more of an ad than an informative article about your community. A lot of people fall for this too. I remember remarking to some people during the Window 95 blitz that I didn't care, and they couldn't understand why I didn't. Why won't the newspaper give my favorite organization free advertising like this?

Going into GameWorks isn't as evil as giving money to Nike, but most of the games at GameWorks cost like $4 a play, and they also have expensive food and merchandise. MTV had a four-hour simulcast of the opening with Beck and Coolio and other artists. And this just has the same effect on all the kids at home as the advertising for Nike does. Every jr. high kid with ordinary white tennis shoes instead of $100 Nikes is made to feel like a loser, and kids who can't afford $25 weekend trips to GameWorks (instead of $1.50 trips to a regular arcade) are made to feel like shit.

And there's also the issue...why are people letting the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and Steven Spielberg, define what it means to be a hip 20 year old Gen Xer? That's the ultimate in top down culture. It's depressing that original artists such as Beck are part of it. The real youth culture can be found down the street at a show at the Velvet Elvis where you can hear great local teenage bands, or in the multitude of zines that people put out locally, or in the regular hangouts where teenagers in the evening can buy coffee for a dollar and they don't sell $40 sweatshirts like Planet Hollywood.

--Christine Peterson, Seattle

Restoring the Balance of Powers Act

Dear ETS!,

The Restoring the Balance of Powers Act is even nastier than it appears, because it contains a "self-repairing" property. That is, if it is declared unconstitutional, by subsequent self-application the law is sustained and doesn't go away unless yet another undefined third power (an insurrection?) intervenes between the time the court makes its ruling and the time the legislature meets to overturn that ruling. (Geek Alert--in software engineering, such situations are called "race conditions" and are invariably bugs that need to be fixed. Legislation is basically software for humans and the same principles apply.)

It's already illegal to set computer viruses loose on the computer-using population. A broad interpretation of law-as- software would make the sponsor of this bill criminally liable for attempting to deliver a virus.

Once, by luck, I caught a dragonfly. As you all know, they are voracious little eating machines. It struggled as I was examining it close-up, and the tip of its abdomen came within reach of its legs. As the tip was moving relatively rapidly, and came into the poor critter's field of vision, it apparently trigged the automatic prey-grasping mechanisms of its nervous system. To my astonishment and horror, it grabbed the tip of its abdomen and started devouring it, even as it was still trying to get away! Is that compartmentalization of function or what? Yes, I still feel somewhat ashamed at what my curiosity led to, and would've never done that had I known. But wouldn't it be nice to be able to trigger the same sort of self-destruction in particularly obnoxious conservative legislators?

--Kurt Cockrum, Seattle

ed. note: We checked on Kurt's concerns with one of the lawyers lobbying against the RBPA in Olympia. She not only confirmed that Kurt's scenario (the first one, not the dragonfly) is quite realistic, but mentioned that another, even worse possible outcome is what she referred to as the "two mirrors" syndrome: that the courts would simply ignore the law, so that you'd have the legislature passing a bill, the courts invalidating it, legislature passes it again, courts nix it again, and so on, in an endless repeating loop.

It's all rather reminiscent of the elementary school joke of writing the phrase "how to keep an idiot busy (over)" on two sides of a piece of paper. The tragedy is that these idiots are making laws that affect all of us.