The furor over Wikileaks has become Theatre of the Absurd. Consider:

• Senator Joe Lieberman says that he can’t understand why the DoJ hasn’t charged Assange with treason, a charge which applies only to US citizens. Assange is Australian.
• New York Times editor Bill Keller, speaking with the BBC, admits that they clear what Wikileaks cables to release with the government. The NYT reporting on the cables often matches pre-established administrative storylines even when the quoted cables, in their entirety, do not fully support that view.
• The Wall Street Journal muses that Assange might be an “enemy combatant” and hints (without stating outright) that assassination might be one way of dealing with him.
• Pravda, the one-time government-run newspaper for the USSR, publishes an op-ed about Wikileaks decrying the use of classified documents to hide wrong-doing.
• Government groups from the Department of Defense to NASA to the Library of Congress block Wikileaks and forbid their employees or contractors from reading any of the widely-available cables.
• The Swedish investigation against Julian Assange for rape and sexual misconduct, an investigation that has started and stopped and started again, led to Interpol issuing a red notice in a new-found commitment to helping catch those accused of rape.
• Mastercard and Visa block credit card charges for donations to Wikileaks, mere weeks after the New York Times showed that they couldn’t bother to shut down the account of an eyeglasses vendor whose business practices included customer intimidation.
• In response, the 4chan-based Anonymous group DDOSes Mastercard and other sites.
• Yesterday, the US announced that they would host World Press Freedom Day in 2011.

This is an infowar as written by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard and staged by Mel Brooks.

On Twitter, I joked about having one thumb and a newly-cut pile of lumber. When I later explained that, no, I hadn’t actually lost one of my thumbs, I said that my high school biology teacher had 1.5 thumbs.

It turns out that this is far more common than I would have expected. At last count, six others have chimed in about their teachers who had missing fingers or toes. My friend Joe Peacock had one who switch to teaching math after losing four fingers teaching shop class. Sadly he did not teach them base 6 math, but Joe did ask if he could only calculate pi to six digits.

This weekend two of my friends had medical emergencies. One of them is still unconscious in a neurological ICU following a motorcycle accident. This has, as you might imagine, left his family in a terrible place, and his wife is having to put together pieces of their life that were left scattered on a highway.

Want to help? Then please, please consider the following suggestions.

Make a living will. Do you want to refuse medical treatment if you’re in a persistent vegetative state? Do you want any and all treatment possible? More importantly, do you want family and friends to have to guess at what you’d want or, worse, fight about it like Terri Schiavo’s family? A living will lets you set out, in a legally binding document, what your wishes are while you can still express them. For the US, Nolo has more information about living wills. Five Wishes is a popular living will, though it requires extra paperwork to be legally binding in eight states, including Alabama. The Lifecare Advanced Directive is excellent but takes time to work through.

Create a durable power of attorney for health care. Your living will won’t be able to cover all hypothetical situations, which means someone’s going to have to make those decisions for you. Choose your health care agent ahead of time, document your choice in a durable power of attorney document, and talk about your wishes with that person. Start with Nolo’s article on selecting a health care agent. The Five Wishes and Lifecare Advanced Directive include a section on designating a health care agent.

Make a will or a trust. If you’ve got assets like a house, bank accounts, or retirement accounts, designate what happens to them if you should die. If you have children, here’s where you appoint someone to take care of them. You can work with a lawyer to draw up a will or trust, or use software like Quicken WillMaker.

Add an ICE entry to your cell phone. “In Case of Emergency” entries on your cell can bolster more traditional methods of identification and can help hospitals contact family members.

Write down your passwords. Chances are you’ve got several computers and accounts that someone would need access to in times of trouble. If you use a password-keeper like 1Password, write down your master password. Put the list where people can get to it in an emergency.

Get a small fire safe, one that’s about the size of a bulky briefcase. The intent isn’t to protect your documents from thieves, but to protect documents against fire or flood and to give someone a one-stop place to go for documents they’ll need. Make copies of the safe key and give them to someone you can trust. And get some dessicant, like the little bags of silicon beads, to keep humidity down in the safe.

Distribute your documents. It’s best to store your original will and similar documents in a bank’s safe deposit box, but those can be hard to get access to in emergency situations. Send copies of your will, living will, and durable power of attorney for health care to your executors and family members. Put copies in your fire safe. Passwords, a list of insurance policies (if any), and information on bank accounts and similar documents go in the fire safe.

Update these documents once a year. Every January, crack open the fire safe and make sure all of the information is still up to date. Anything that isn’t needs to be changed.

Doing all of this is a task that’s easy to put off. Don’t. Spend some time this month getting your affairs in order. Those around you will be thankful later.

Our music collection lives on a network-shared drive. One of my ongoing annoyances with iTunes is, if it can’t find that drive because the network is down, it marks all of the music with an exclamation point icon. That icon keeps iTunes from synching the songs with your iPod or iPhone. Once the drive is again accessible, you can remove the icon by loading each track’s information individually, but there’s no good way within iTunes to tell the program, “Hey, idiot, my songs are back. Re-scan my library and you’ll see.”

There’s a workaround, though. When you start up iTunes, hold down option (Mac) or shift (Windows). iTunes will ask you what iTunes library it should load. Select your original iTunes library. iTunes will re-load it and, as a by-product, strip the exclamation point from all the files it can now find.

On Monday, NASA issued a press release announcing a news conference today at 2 PM EST on an astrobiology discovery. They gave no further details other than to say that it would “impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life” and that the journal Science had the full paper.

As you can imagine, people’s imaginations went running wild. Jason Kottke, like many others, speculated that NASA had found life on other planets, most likely one of Saturn’s moons. That was shot down by Alexis Madrigal, senior technology editor at The Atlantic.

Last night, NASA Watch announced that NASA had discovered arsenic-based life, and now Gizmodo is claiming the same thing. This is really, really exciting.

The basic building blocks of life, as drilled into me by my grade-school biology teacher, are CHONPS: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. That’s what you find when you crack open most organic molecules, and are at the heart of everyone’s DNA, human or animal. Not the new bacteria found by NASA, though: it’s based on arsenic, a poisonous (to us!) compound. This is something we didn’t know was possible.

It’s not life on another planet, but it is life made out of completely different building blocks than we’re familiar with. If this is true, it’ll give us insight into other possible biochemistries and affect our understanding of biology. In short, it’s a very big deal.

Last night, before combining The Last Airbender with Rifftrax, I made the mistake of watching it without the sarcastic commentary. Surprise! It truly earned its 6% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. I was fascinated, though, with why it’s so eye-bleedingly bad.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the whitewashed casting and how it undermined the setting established by the original Nickelodeon series. I will admit that I was taken aback by seeing a Fire Nation represented by actors of Indian, Maori, and Iranian descent, not to mention a notionally Inuit group of people represented by two very white actors. But leaving aside that giant misstep, the movie did a terrible job of condensing the original source material into a movie, in large part because it’s focused on the wrong thing.

The movie is based on the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a cartoon on Nickelodeon. That series’ first season was over ten hours long. The movie runs a little over an hour and a half, yet attempts to fit all of the first season’s major plot points into that time.

The result? A whole lot of stuff happens, a giant brownie of plot with dollops of exposition ice cream and topped with a glaze of voice-overs, but there’s little meaning to the action. To fit in all of the story, they had to dispense with character development.

In the series, the main characters have time to grow and become fully-realized people. Aang comes to terms with being the Avatar; Katara learns to trust in her strength; Zuko learns who he is and what he truly values. This is the series’ core, the real story being told. In the movie they’re ciphers, blown about by the winds of plot. The Last Airbender doesn’t even bother with common movie shorthand to signpost character growth, and skips any real banter and character interaction for poorly-staged and ill-paced action sequences.

For my day job I write proposals and put presentations together to teach people about my company’s technology. A big part of my job is deciding what story I’m telling, and to whom, and what the most critical parts of that story are. Because of that I’ve gotten better at recognizing when a story is about more than the specific events of its plot. In focusing on cramming ten pounds of plot into a two-pound bag, Shyamalan lost sight of what Avatar was truly about.

Here’s hoping that it won’t be too many more years until this is what we are all doing every Saturday morning.

Chris Crawford is a visionary game designer. He began his career at Atari and created some of the earliest computer-based wargames. He founded the Computer Game Developers’ Conference and The Journal of Computer Game Design. In 1985 released his best-known game, Balance of Power. In it, you played either the President of the US or the General Secretary of the USSR and worked to gain as much prestige for your country as possible without lighting off a nuclear war.

Even then, though, his real interest was in making games that told stories. In 1992, dismayed by the direction in which the computer games industry was going and frustrated by a lack of progress on true interactive stories, he gave The Dragon Speech in which he declared that he was leaving the games industry to pursue his dream of interactive storytelling before charging out of the room.

For the last twenty years he’s been working on this problem. He released the Erasmatron system in 1997; in 2007, he released the updated Storytron system. I’ve not been impressed with either, and not just because he considers interactive fiction a dead end. He has taken a reductionist approach to modeling human interaction, boiling it down into variables to be tracked and formulas describing their interaction and then attempting to create an emergent story from those variables and formulas. My experience mirrors Emily Short’s: I have yet to find a story built entirely from such a pile of numbers that has the power of a more deliberately authored story. As Crawford’s own Erasmatron showed, procedurally generating entire stories is hard.

Earlier this year Chris Crawford turned sixty. When he did, he wrote a meditation on reaching this milestone. Most striking to me was his willingness to face his mortality head-on through the concrete metaphor of beads in a jar and his clear-eyed assessment of how successful his life’s work has been.

Thus, when my sixtieth birthday struck, I found myself bereft of achievement in my most important undertaking. I have always felt a calm self-assurance that I am right, that I have developed ideas that would surely conquer the world if I only gave the world enough time to recognize them. My sixtieth birthday shouted loudly that my ideas had most definitely failed to conquer the world. It certainly looks as if I am a washed-up failure. I don’t really believe that — I still believe that I’ve hit upon a solid approach to interactive storytelling and that someday the world will appreciate my work. But with each passing day the evidence of my failure mounts.

I do not know if I could make such a ferocious, unflinching critique of my life as Crawford has done of his. I have not agreed with his approach, and am not one who is in awe of his ideas, but I am in awe of his willingness to give up safe choices and iterative development and instead run headlong, screaming a battle cry, in a two-decade-long attempt to slay his chosen dragon. Crawford’s ideas may not have won me over, but as the trajectory of my own life begins to curve downward, I could do far worse than to be won over by his tenacity.

I’ve known Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin for fifteen years. He’s one of those mad creative types who fizzes with ideas like a seven year old filled with Pop Rocks. He’s best known for his interactive fiction such as So Far (winner of 4 XYZZY awards), Spider and Web (winner of 5 XYZZY awards), and Hunter, in Darkness (winner of 2 XYZZY awards). Notice all of those awards? That’s because his work is stellar, and often groundbreaking.

Andrew wants to quit his job for (at least) six months and focus on text adventures. To do so, he’s raising money to fund development of his next game, Hadean Lands. It’ll be coming out on the iPhone, and if you contribute $25 you can get a version that’ll run on your laptop or home computer. In addition, he plans on working on his other IF projects. He asked for $8,000.

He had that amount in 12 hours.

This is astounding and cool, and guarantees that he’s going to write his game, but I want him to be able to do more. He’s not just funding a game, he’s funding development of tools that will help the entire interactive fiction community. You know how you can play some of my smaller games in a browser? Andrew’s written a similar tool for larger games. He’s planning on enhancing it and speeding it up. He’ll be adding to his open-source IF game engine. He’ll be promoting text adventures at PAX East. He’ll be providing the iPhone framework he’s creating to other IF authors. By supporting him, you’re indirectly supporting the whole of interactive fiction.

Not convinced? Try the game’s teaser. The game’s about a spaceship driven by alchemy and supported by a dragon. It’s so high concept I hurt my neck looking up at it.

So go donate. Any amount is welcome. $3 will get you the game when it comes out. $10 will get you a postcard feelie. $25 gets you the game on CD. Let’s see how far over his goal we can put him.