This was driven home to me recently when I foolishly started re-playing Animal Crossing after a hiatus of a few months. I enjoyed putting the town back together and “improving” it for a few days. Then, I took a vacation. And when I came back, the prospect of having to do it all over again because I wasn’t playing on the game’s preferred schedule made me angry.

This feeling of spite has been compounded by the fact that I’ve been playing (and buying) tons of iPhone games recently, and then also bought a Windows game for $30.

Here’s the difference between most good iPhone games and the PC game you last bought:

• The iPhone game cost 1/10th the price of the PC game, or less.
• The iPhone game was fun within the first minute of playing it. There was no obligatory hour of drudgery to get to the good part.
• You probably bought the iPhone game when you were in the grocery store. It came to you. To buy the PC game you either went to a store, went home to your desk, or ordered it from Amazon.

This vibe, in other words, was summed up on a forum site by a game developer complaining about PC games that took too long to become interesting: “[Games that take an hour before the fun starts] have to compete with wine, donuts and sex which all provide fun from the very beginning.”

Damn straight.

Something bothered me about this argument, but I wasn’t really following it very closely, and I hadn’t read the book, so I tossed off some sarcastic one-liners on Twitter about it (something along the lines of “When you’ve written as many books as Lois McMaster Bujold, you get to complain about this.” Bujold had gotten involved in the discussion, and was tarred and feathered by some of the participants along with Wrede). My friends Nat and Laura rightly called me on this as wrong-headed, as appeal to authority doesn’t settle the issue. I resolved to not comment on the issue again until I’d read the book.

I’ve read the book now. And now I know what was bothering me about the discussion: it was led, as near as I can tell, by people who were offended by the premise of The Thirteenth Child, rather than by the book. But premises aren’t books.

I have a sense, but no actual proof, that this willingness to confuse a premise with a book is more common among genre fans. Certainly I have trouble imagining a serious literary critic pillorying (or, for that matter, lauding!) a book without at least trying to read it: that would be a career-ending move. But looking at what I take to be the genesis of the flamewar I see a disturbing pattern: those (in this thread, who I noticed) who scream loudest and most stridently that Wrede is “erasing native Americans” also say things like “I haven’t read the book, nor will I”. One is free to experience a work or not at one’s pleasure, of course. I myself won’t watch any of Lars von Trier’s films, without even bothering to find out what the premise is. But that very decision makes (or should make) my opinions on his films of limited value.

With regards to The Thirteenth Child I have read the book, and throughout it I see Wrede dealing fairly sensitively, and subtly, with a variety of racial and gender issues. No, the Native Americans and First Peoples are not present, but Wrede drops a number of hints as to where their culture is. Her protagonist, a young girl named Eff, is fairly deeply buried inside a culture that is itself patriarchal and racist, and so does not call out injustice in her own voice stridently, but Wrede still manages to get the point across that this is a racist and sexist society. That, to me, tells me that this issue was on her mind, and she was trying to deal with it as much as her plot and character decisions would allow.

Judging a book by its summary is a dangerous business. It’s perfectly accurate, from a plot perspective, to describe Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow as a reverie, written by a Christian, in which Auschwitz is presented as a facility for resurrecting Jews. Likewise, Johnathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones could be described as an apologia for every Nazi indicted at Nuremberg. Both of these descriptions fail to accurately capture what you experience when you actually read the books, instead of the blurbs on the back of the covers.

I am not implying here that all of Wrede’s critics are book-burning zealots; there’s a lot to criticize in The Thirteenth Child. Many of the characters are flat and somewhat interchangable, the protagonist isn’t as well-developed as she should be, and there’s too much telling and not enough showing. There are also some reviews by people who actually read the book who view the racial issues as more problematic than I do. My central — and perhaps only — point here is that describing a book as racist without having read it is, in my mind, a problematic act in and of itself.

In the digital world they had yet to recapture this magic, until now. Now Olympus stands alone as the first major camera line to finally realize that there are people out there who want a small camera with a decent sensor. They have given us the EP-1, a digital reincarnation of the Pen half frame cameras of yore. And of course, all the camera people can do is whine.

Ok. I have to give some of them credit for seeing what is great about this machine. The Online Photographer ran two good pieces about it, both of which pointed out all the things to like:

1. It’s small. About Canon G10 sized.

2. It has the same sensor and imaging pipeline as the Olympus DSLR cameras. You can shoot fast frame to frame and you can shoot four RAW frames per second for ten shots. That’s all anyone who does not work for Sports Illustrated will ever need.

3. It will come with a great set of small lenses, so you don’t have to carry a 2lb camera body and a collection of 1.5lb zoom lenses on your next trip.

4. Real hot shoe. Real flash system.

And confronted with this, how do people react? The smart ones see a wonderful gift handed to them from the camera industry gods. A niche camera to satisfy an enthusiast niche. The real camera dorks can only say:

It does not have an optical viewfinder, therefore it is unusable.

Never mind that in the entire history of the camera universe there have only ever been five non-SLR cameras with decent optical viewfinders (see note below). Or that fitting a viewfinder on the machine would make it too big. Or that the entire point of this new 4/3rds form factor is that the camera has no mirror box so there is no way to actually provide an optical viewfinder.

Finally, medium format and large format cameras have come without eye level viewfinders for centuries and no one ever had trouble composing pictures on those primitive machines.

Mike Johnston has also argued these points better than I can, so I’ll quit now.

Olympus did not fit it with a 10-35/1.4 zoom lens, making it useless in low light.

Never mind that the entire modern world has been happily shooting with the 2.8 wide angle zoom lenses for the last 15 years or so. Or that the fact that you can push sensors to ISO 1600 obviates much of the need for large aperture lenses. Or the fact that a large aperture zoom (or prime) would be huge and completely defeat the purpose of the entire machine.

Finally, there are more minor pieces of whining about how the AF is not phase detect (again, no mirror box) or how the LCD is second rate, or how it doesn’t come in black.

So, to summarize, what the real camera dork wants is a black camera with the viewfinder of an EOS-1Ds, a zoom lens the size of the Nikon 14-24/2.8, a full frame 35mm sensor, and a body the size of a Leica M6. That shouldn’t be hard, what do these camera engineers do all day anyway?

I’m here to say, ignore all of this. When this camera comes out you should go and try it for yourself. It’s not often that a company takes a risk listening to the enthusiast market the way Olympus has with this camera. They should be paid back for it. We should all be in the Amazon pre-order queue. Otherwise, we’re all just dorkier than thou.

Notes

The five optical viewfinder cameras that are decent are:

1. Leica M.

2. Those Canonet things from the 70s.

3. Konica Hexar AF.

4. Konica Hexar RF.

5. The Cosina RF cameras.

If I forgot your favorite viewfinder camera, accept my apologies. You were probably wrong about it anyway. I’m out of here.

I have always suspected that there are common bonds that hold all the dorks of the world together. I think this is especially true with respect to how the male dork becomes emotionally invested in the objects of his interest and affection. Until now we never had the ability to gather enough data about this. Information about various male enthusiasms were inconveniently scattered among thousands of small scale publications or local clubs. Clubs which met in the less desirable parts of town at the end of dark alleyways and behind doors that could barely contain the stink. It was a lot of work to even find these places, much less endure actual social contact to observe the interactions of the club members.

Like many things, the Internet has changed all of this. Over the last decade or so, our capacity to observe the dork has increased a thousand-fold as the Internet has brought the desires and concerns of millions of dorks into sharp focus. Thus, on the blogs, in the audio podcasts (no video please) and most of all in the forums, we can observe the dork from the relative safety of our living rooms, free from the fear of physical contact.

Thus, I have collected my data, and thus I can present the grand (yet obvious) conclusion that all male enthusiasts basically have the same set of behaviors and emotional responses to the subject of their desires. These behaviors are nearly universal and independent of the actual area of interest and they cut across all socioeconomic boundaries. I have a few humble examples.

Arbitrary Technical Stratification

In the dork’s world there are only two kinds of products, those that are good and those that suck. Products that make the cut are spoken of in hushed and respectful tones. Products that suck are binned into categories and given various derogatory names. In general the distinction between the good and the bad is the thinnest and most arbitrary set of technical distinctions.

Examples: Good games are “hard core” or “deep” and have “meaningful moral choices”. Bad games are “kiddie”, “shallow”, “casual minigames” or worst of all: just a tech demo.

Good cameras are serious instruments that will help you capture excellent images (always images, never pictures). Bad cameras are always “too plasticky” and missing some critical feature that you will only use twice, like mirror lockup. Also, you have to carry a 10lb tripod anywhere or you are just a loser.

Good cars are fast, handle well and are fun to drive. Bad cars are “appliances” or a tinny “penalty box” with no speed, “numb” steering, and lots of useless features, like a radio.

You could do this forever.

Innovative Conservatism

Dorks demand innovation. I doubt that there is a dork complaint more universal than “they just don’t make anything new anymore.” But when “they” do make something new, the people who hate it most are usually the enthusiasts. What enthusiasts really want is for the new stuff to be just like the old stuff, but different. The most common complaint here takes the form “all they had to do was take X and do Y, but instead they did the whole thing wrong.”

Examples: Zelda: Wind Waker was a “kiddie cartoon” instead of just like the N64 Zelda with higher resolution textures and a teenage Link.

The Chris Bangle BMWs were wildly popular with consumers and widely copied by the rest of the industry. Enthusiasts didn’t see why BMW couldn’t have just tweaked the existing styling, which was nearly perfect already. The Truth About Cars has the largest collection of complaints like this yet collected on the Internet, as far as I can tell.

Crippling Nostalgia

A twist on the previous syndrome, nostalgia is a powerful force that colors how the enthusiast evaluates every new product. It is generally the case that every new product will be evaluated against a platonic ideal that was put in place by whatever the dork was lusting after when he was 14. In video games, this accounts for the inordinate amount of praise that is lavished on the Bioware RPGs for the PC, or the original Final Fantasy games, or Chrono-Trigger.

In cameras, no camera is ever as good as that Leica you wanted, or the manual Nikon your dad had. Although really, any digital point and shoot is probably better for most people.

In stereo equipment, it’s turntables and tubes.

In bicycles, it’s steel frames and side-pull brakes.

And of course in cars there are the old Volvos, anything with real wheel drive, and my personal favorite the old Honda Civic Hatchbacks.

Nostalgia in an of itself is understandable and natural. But the enthusiast tends to elevate his nostalgic favorites above all of what the modern world has to offer. But the truth is that the older stuff wasn’t that good. Not even back then.

Obsession with Control

All I need to illustrate this one is a series of quotes.

“I’ll never buy any game that doesn’t use a mouse and keyboard.”

“I’ll never buy a car that doesn’t have a manual transmission. I hate slushboxes.”

“That camera is useless because it doesn’t have a manual mode.”

“I can’t use any operating system that doesn’t let me completely control everything that I install or manage. And it has to be totally flexible too.”

So, you know what I mean now, right?

The Oppression of the Masses

This one is short and sweet. The “mass market” are a bunch of know-nothing drones who will buy whatever crap is foisted upon them by the forces of mediocrity. The enthusiast “knows better”, and is more discerning and generally more intelligent. He wouldn’t be caught dead in some plasticky appliance that takes all his fun and control away and thus doesn’t let him capture the complete and mature experience. Or something. In any case, all enthusiasts are beaten down and oppressed by the man whose only goal is commerce. Instead, the industry should go broke by catering to a tiny niche of dorks instead. That’s always a winning strategy, in the mind of the enthusiast anyway.

Latent Object Hysteria

Finally we come back to an observation that I made with almost my very first post on this great web site. It is universally true that the next thing will always be the best thing ever.

I still think the video game people do this best. Just today I was listening to the podcast over at Gamers With Jobs when one of the speakers launched into a multi-minute drooling and gasping tirade about how a few upcoming games from Bioware were going to be so good that it would be as if Jesus himself came back to earth to shepherd everyone up to video game nirvana. I found this idea curious, especially because Bioware really hasn’t done anything that good since KOTOR. And really, it’s not clear to me that the stuff before KOTOR was that good either. No doubt I’m setting myself up for assault and battery here.

Nonetheless, no one loves the unreleased product more than than enthusiast. And, no one is more disappointed with the released product than, you guessed it, the enthusiast. This is the inevitable way of the world. When you think about it, how else could the dorks keep up this level of the energy and interest? The desire has to come from somewhere. It comes from the capacity that all of us have to want to replicate that which can’t be repeated: that first, perfect experience with whatever it was that got us hooked for life. We keep looking anyway, even if it makes us act like dorks.

Exercise for the Reader

At this point you should be able to figure out which of the above behaviors I have indulged in. Hint: this is an easy question.

It’s best to have a good system for this. So I’ve broken the recipe up into stages.

Dough, Stage 1

1. Start with 2-3 cups of flour and one cup of cold water.

2. You must use crappy bleached bad for you Pillsbury all purpose flour. The fancy-ass organic whole wheat stuff will make you crappy dough. Trust me.

3. Put most of the flour in a bowl. Add 3/4ths of the water but not all and stir it around with chopsticks.

4. If the flour does not soak up all the water, add flour. If it is too dry, add water. Stir some more, check again. Turn the mixture out on to a board and knead it until it holds together. Don’t worry about making the ball smooth.

Obviously I can’t tell you how to tell when the dough is right. That is what you need my mom for. But, what you are after is a dough that is pretty stiff, but soft enough to still be workable. It should take some work to poke it with your finger, but it should eventually bounce back. And, there should be enough moisture in the dough to hold it together. The rest time in the fridge will relax the dough and even out the wet, making the dough softer when you finally work with it.

Having had more experience with this, I think it might work better to measure the flour by weight to try and get a more consistent behavior. But we have not experimented with this yet.

5. Put the ball into a ziploc bag and stick it in the fridge for a few hours.

6. Pull the ball out of the fridge. The dough should be stiff but flexible. Knead it around a bit, adding flour if it is sticky. Put it back in the fridge for a few more hours.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any photos of making the dough. Make two balls to use up the filling recipe below.

Filling, Stage 1

Start with about a pound of ground pork. Now chop up one bunch of scallions, mostly the tops. You do this by first slicing them the long way, then collecting up the pieces and chopping them the short way. You want it to be about this size:

Now chop up some ginger the same way. Make about a half a cup of it. You won’t use all of it, but it’s good to have extra just in case. You want the ginger to be about the same size:

Finally, do the same for a head of Napa cabbage. You can use a food processor to finish to job if you want.

Salt the cabbage and twist it in cheese cloth to squeeze the juice out of it. You want the cabbage to be as dry as you can make it. Save the juice in a bowl.

Now collect all your ingredients together:

Put the pork and a bowl. Add a pinch of salt and some ground pepper. Then add about a tablespoon of soy sauce. Mix this together along with a couple of handfuls of the scallion and as much ginger as you can stand. I used to put in sesame oil at this point too, but decided that there was no point in that. Mix the meat and veggies together with a fork or two chopsticks until you have broken the meat down a bit, like this:

I usually use the smell and look of the meat mixture to figure out how to adjust the ingredients. After the initial pass I usually add a bit more soy and some more scallion.

Now set this side and start to get the dough ready for filling.

Dough, Stage 2

Get the dough out of the fridge about an hour before you start to work in earnest. Cut the ball into three pieces and roll each out into a long string about 1/4 inch in diameter. Then pull pieces of dough off this string by hand. Each piece should be maybe 1/2 an inch long. You can use a dough blade or a knife for this, but after you get good at it the pulling method is easier. If the dough is right the pieces should come off with a loud snap. Now squish them into small rounds with the heel of your hand, so they look like this:

Each round should be around a half inch to an inch across. Do one “rope” at a time. About the time the first rope is done, finish the last stage of making the filling.

Filling, Stage 2

Now finish the filling by adding the cabbage. You want to add the cabbage last and then assemble immediately. The reason you want to do this is if you add the cabbage too soon and then let the meat sit, it will fall apart later. So, for one pound of pork add about 2 to 3 cups of the chopped cabbage from before depending on how much you like. Mix it into the meat. Then add a few tablespoons of cabbage juice. You want to get the filling to be a moist paste, but not too wet. So add the juice slowly until you get a feel for when the filling is right. It should look like this:

Now you are ready for assembly.

Assembly Line

First, you have to roll the skin out. Take one of the little rounds you had before and a small rolling pin. The best kind of rolling pin is made by cutting a broomstick-sized dowel into a pin about 6 inches long.

Get a lot of flour on the dough, the pin, the board, and your hands. Roll the dough from the edge into the middle. Then turn it 30 degrees, then roll it again, then turn, repeating until you’ve spun it round once or twice. You want to roll it about as thin as those frozen wonton skins. Those are a good reference, so buy some, but don’t use them for dumplings, or I’ll have to beat you. They suck.

The goal is to have the middle of the skin be a bit thicker than the sides, so it can support the filling. Like this (thanks to The Cookworm for the photo):

Perfect roundness and uniformity of size is not important. The guy filling the skin can fix that in post.

Assuming you are right handed, here is how you fold the dumplings: take one of the rolled out skins and hold it in the palm of your left hand face up. Put a small amount of filling in the middle. Now with your right hand, pick up the skin in the “middle” and fold it over the filling and pinch it together on the other side. Then turn the thing over to the left, pinch the left ends together, and work your way back to the middle. Then do the same thing from the right end. When you start at this, you usually end up with something that looks like a ravioli. But, with practice, you’ll get stuff that looks more like a pot sticker and can “stand up”.

When my mom makes these, she can supply three or four fillers with enough skins to keep busy. You will be slower (until about 40 years from now). So balance the number of rollers and fillers according to the talent you have. At our get togethers I can usually fold fast enough to keep up with 3 or 4 of the “guests” who we have enslaved.

When you get one filled and folded, it should look like this:

Or, if my mom has made you a perfectly sized skin:

Take the filled dumplings and put them on a tray. I like to use sheet pans with floured wax paper. Don’t let them sit around too long before cooking. An hour or two at most. Anything you don’t cook should be frozen on the trays, then put into freezer bags.

Cooking

To make the boiled dumplings, fill a large pot with water. Bring to a boil. Drop the dumplings in one by one. Cook until they float, then a couple of minutes past or until you are sure the pork is cooked through.

Pot stickers are trickier, but more fun, to make. Get a non-stick frying pan on medium heat. Add some oil and lay out the dumplings like this:

Mix 1/4 cup water with 2 dashes of vinegar and pour it into the pan. You want enough liquid to steam the tops of the dumplings for a bit, but not so much that they cook in it. If the liquid doesn’t dry out, you won’t get crunchy bottoms.

Cover and cook about 10 minutes. With practice you’ll figure out how long to cook them to get the nice burnt bottom that gives the dish its name.

If you get really good you can turn them out on to the serving platter in one piece:

People love that sort of flourish.

Pot stickers are great fun, but the truth is that the boiled ones are better. You get the soft chewy “pasta” followed the meaty filling followed by the crunch of the vegetables followed by the yummy cooking juices. There’s nothing like it.

Serve these with soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil and hot sauce. Your guests can mix these however they want for dipping. Or you can eat the things plain.

By “it”, of course, I mean “find a humorous property and turn it into a point-and-click adventure game,” and not necessarily “rolling around naked in fat sacks of cash,” although frankly I’m pretty sure they’re doing that as well.

Their latest victory, as they trundle across the face of PC gaming like Germany crossing Belgium, is Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventure, a series of 4 games for Windows PCs and the Xbox 360. The first episode, Fright of the Bumblebees, does a good job of successfully transplanting the feel of a Wallace and Gromit movie to your computer screen.

The plot — and the humor — is spot on. At various times in the game you control either Wallace or Gromit, and the sorts of puzzles you’re called upon to solve could be lifted straight out of a short. The game can be configured to offer hints more or less frequently, according to your taste, so you’re only as stuck on a given puzzle as you want to be.

Not everything is wine and roses. Telltale tweaks the user interface to their games with each release. This time around, it didn’t go so well. Perhaps in an effort to maintain the “cinematic” feel of the Wallace and Gromit shorts, many of the screens have fixed camera angles that are uncomfortably tight. Coupled to this is a new control scheme where you move using the W-A-S-D keys, using the mouse mostly to manipulate your inventory. At least in the first game of the series, discovering “hot spots” is a matter of walking near an object and hoping your character decides to look at the right thing. If you ever played Lucasarts’ brilliant-yet-frustrating Grim Fandango you know the sort of scheme I’m talking about. This was a source of some frustration to me. It did, I should say, feel more natural on the Xbox Live version of the game.

Most of this frustration is front-loaded, and by the time you reach the second act of the game you’ll have thoroughly adapted. My only other complaint, of course, is that there isn’t a Mac OS X version of the game. But hope springs eternal.

Apart from this, it looks like once again Telltale has a hit on their hands. I can’t wait for this summer’s release of Monkey Island. It’s as if someone formed a company whose entire purpose in life was just to make me happy.

My initial point of attack on this subject was to be dismissive. I wrote a comment that started:

I am firmly in the camp that the spirit of the exercise matters more than the tool.

I went through a phase with rangefinder cameras starting with the Konica Hexar (better than a Leica in many ways) and the Hexar RF and even the fabulous Mamiya 6. While none of these is the Leica itself, the last two are fairly close in terms of how they handle. One just has a tiny motor drive and the other shoots big pieces of film instead of small ones.

What I learned from that whole experience is that I was better off with my Nikon and a single lens.

And so on. The problem with this kind of argument is that you can’t really accuse someone of irrational nostalgia and expect him to either listen to your point or be grateful that you said anything. Irrational nostalgia does that to people.

As I was about to hit the post button, I was called away to perform some kind of household task, and while this was going on I realized that my real objection to this whole exercise was not about using the Leica. What’s really wrong here is that the whole task is about learning technique rather than photography.

Take his points one by one. The Leica is quiet, so … so what? So you can point the thing at someone’s face and they don’t hear the shutter? They still see you pointing it at their face. The Leica is simple. You set three things and shoot. Meh. You can use my Nikon that way too. You should know how to use your camera anyway. Shooting black and white film will “force” you to think about light and form. This is in fact true, but it’s still about technique rather than photography. The darkroom work will teach you about exposure, development and printing. Technique, technique, technique.

Don’t think that I don’t think these things are important. I took three years of black and white photography classes because I think they are important. Everyone should know how to do these things. But I think that the whole exercise misses the point because it’s only concentrating on the easy part of photography. Everything he talks about is easily mastered if you spend enough time practicing and learning the right lessons from your practicing.

Here is what the year with the Leica will not teach you:

1. What do I like to take pictures of?

2. What’s the right tool for the sorts of pictures I want to take?

3. How do I take pictures that communicate the emotional attachment I have with the subject to the viewer?

Here is what the year with the Leica will teach you:

4. Having answered questions 1, 2, and 3 above, how do I use black and white film to capture the picture I want in the Leica and then print it in my chemical darkroom while breathing fumes that will kill me?

and maybe

5. Just what is it that makes people so nuts for Leicas? Is it that you have to load the film from the bottom of the fucking camera?

So, if answers to the last two questions are what you yearn for, by all means go pick up that M6 on Ebay and come to my house and buy my darkroom. Mike’s exercise will serve you well.

But, if what you really want to learn is how to be a photographer, then I think what you should do is learn to use your camera very well and then figure out what kinds of pictures you like to take and how to capture them in the most effective way possible. The Leica will be no better at teaching you that than a cheap Canon point and shoot. More importantly, the Leica won’t really take pictures that are any better than any other camera. It’s the guy holding the camera that does that, not the machine.

One of the things that I tried to do a lot in my rangefinder phase was to get better at people pictures. I do this every time I have a new toy to play with. After years of trying without much success I finally realized that I am no good at taking people pictures, and no camera or lighting technique or other magic equipment will fix this. I am not good at taking pictures of people because it’s not in my nature to connect with them in the way you need to to take good pictures. I’m just not that interested. I am an antisocial bastard. This is why I’ll never be a wedding photographer, unlike this guy.

Anyway, what I would do is this:

Pick any camera you want and any single lens. Shoot in black and white for a year. Take all kinds of pictures of all kinds of things. Edit fiercely. Show your best pictures to someone who will tear them apart ruthlessly. Learn what you like to look at and what looks good when you shoot it. The answers here are different for everyone. The goal is to find the ones that work for you.

If it were me, I’d do it with either an old Nikon or maybe the Panasonic LX-3 point and shoot, but with the lens stuck on wide. That thing is great.

Let me acknowledge up front that these lessons are colored by my personal hangup about “not getting ripped off”, where “ripped off” is defined as “paid too much for a given new car, by some semi-objective standard.” If you don’t share that hangup, a lot of this won’t apply to you.

Also, many people believe that the best way to avoid paying too much money for a new car is to buy a great used car. I am sure that this is true. However, I’m too stupid about cars to pick a good used car, so someone else will have to help you with that, if that’s how you want to go.

So warned, please read on.

Don’t Panic

If you, like me, are the sort of person that drives your car until it dies, then you may end up shopping for a car because you need a car immediately. This is not a state that leads to good decision making. If you can borrow a car while you shop, do it. If you need to, rent a car for a couple of weeks while you shop. The couple of hundred dollars you put into a rental will probably pay off on the back end (and if you’re lucky, you may even be able to rent one of the cars you’re thinking about buying).

Your Local Car Dealer

Your local car dealer is an obstacle between you and the car you want to buy. The most useful thing about them is that they have the car you want to test drive. So go test drive a bunch of cars! If you walk into the dealership knowing that you’re not going to buy a car, test driving cars can be fun.

In this round of test drives, I always told the dealer I wasn’t buying that day, and they always assumed that I was lying. Since I assume that everything that comes out of the dealer’s mouth is a lie, too, that ended up working out for the most part. This leads directly to a rule of thumb I have.

Rule #1: When test driving, never sit anywhere in a car dealership except in the car you want to test drive. At one Suzuki dealership I went to, the dealer managed to get me into his office and promptly disappeared to “look up a few numbers.” So I left. This is related to…

Rule #2: Don’t talk money with your test-drive dealerships. Nothing good can come of it, for reasons that I’ll explain later on.

If you don’t have your heart set on a particular car, test drive lots of cars. Enjoy the process. But most importantly, when you’ve winnowed the candidate cars down to a short list…

Rule #3: Test drive the cars you’re serious about back-to-back. Your memory will play tricks on you, and lie to you. Driving the cars you are interested in one after the other will crystallize their differences. After my first round of drives, I ranked the Mazda3 and the Volkswagen Jetta TDI as offering about the same driving experience, with only a slight edge to the TDI. When I drove them back-to-back in my second round, the TDI trounced the Mazda3 by a mile.

Rule #4: Note the most common option packages while you’re test driving. Walk around the lot a little. Ask the dealer about which options the cars on the lot have. This is going to come into play later when you make an offer on the car by email.

Decisions

Eventually, you’ll get down to a short list of cars, and you need to pick one. My only piece of advice here is “Make the decision at home, not at the dealership.”

Research

The gold standard for information about car prices is Edmunds.com. You tell their web site what car you’re looking for, what options you want, and it boils it down to what they call their “True Market Value”, or “what others are paying.” If you’re a kick-ass hardcore negotiator, or if you’re buying a car that isn’t hugely popular, the TMV is probably higher than what you could negotiate. But if you’re that sort of person, you stopped reading this article ten paragraphs ago because you love buying cars. I, on the other hand, hate buying cars. For me, the Edmunds TMV basically is my “sucker line”: if I can get to the TMV, then I at least know I’m paying about the average of what everyone else is paying. Edmunds also has a pretty nice system to inform you of manufacturer to consumer (or dealer) incentives and financing deals. You’re going to use Edmunds to figure out what you plan on offering for the car.

If you are buying a hugely popular car (poster child: the MINI Cooper), the TMV will be around MSRP. Congratulations! Your negotiation just got easier because you’re likely going to just go into your MINI dealer and pay them MSRP. Stop reading, and go do that, and enjoy your new car.

A word about options: Edmunds lets you configure the options packages in great detail. You want to configure a car with the ‘common’ option packages that you discovered while you were at the dealer doing test drives. The more specific your needs are, the more difficult the next phase of the process is going to be. So it’s in your best interests to be happy with the typically configured car in the class you’ve chosen.

Financing

This is up to you, but if you can finance the purchase yourself or through some service like E-Loan, you’re removing another variable from the negotiation, which is always good. Obviously if the manufacturer has a good incentive, you may want to take them up on it.

The Pitch

So you know what car you want. You know how much it costs. You know exactly what color you want (Note: I don’t really care about the color of my car, and maybe you don’t either. Car dealers get really, really upset if you tell them “I could care less what color the car is.” You can literally watch their synapses start to fry if you say this to them. So be a mensch, and just say “black” if you really don’t care.) You’re going to send an email to every dealer of the brand you want within a certain radius of where you live. Your email will read like this:

Dear car dealer:

I plan on buying a car within 3 days. I will be purchasing a 2009 Vauxhall Vectra, black with the gold lamé interior, with the bluetooth (VVBT3) and navigation (VVNV3) options, for the price of $18,600, plus tax and transfer. I will be [paying cash / financing through Vauxhall Credit with a down payment of $4,000]. I [will / will not] be trading in a car. I will be buying the car from the first dealer to meet my offer. You may contact me by email, or call me at (555) 555-1212.

I look forward to hearing from you,

A. Buyer

This letter does a few things to get the dealers’ attention:

• It tells them that you are ready to buy, and aren’t just looking.
• It tells them that you know how you are paying.
• It tells them that you know exactly what you want.
• It tells them that time is of the essence, and if they want to sell you a car, they have to act immediately.

In other words, you’re removing variables from the negotiation, and making it easier to get to yes. In some sense, the Internet can be used to reverse the traditional equation: the dealer applies pressure to get you to agree to his demands on a timeframe of his choosing. Instead, you’re setting the timeframe, and the price, and pressuring the dealer into agreeing to your terms.

Probably the most significant variable in any car deal is the value of your trade-in. I have absolutely no advice on how to negotiate this, because I never trade in my cars. I’d be interested in hearing from alert readers on this topic, though.

You’re giving them your phone number because that’s how you’re going to let them close the deal. You shouldn’t expect a bid by email: I’ve seen them, but many dealers don’t like to give them because they (reasonably) assume you’ll turn around and use them to bargain someone else down. If you’ve done your homework, you should be able to get to a deal within 2 or 3 short phone calls. The main thing you want to nail down on that call is what the tax and transfer fees are going to be, exactly, so that you’re not ambushed by the Finance guy during the actual closing.

How many dealers should you contact? Well, how far you’re willing to drive to pick up your car is up to you, but obviously, the farther you’re willing to go, the more likely someone is going to meet your price. I arbitrarily picked 150 miles as my limit, and I found someone within 40 that met my price.

A variant of this tactic is to not name a price, but to ask the dealer for their best price, and indicate that you’ll buy from the dealer with the lowest bid. Some people report success with this method. From my perspective, it just means having to have longer conversations with car dealers, which is something I attach a pretty high monetary cost to.

Does It Work?

Acura TSX

Why would the dealership I visited be so stupid? I have a few theories. First, they assume that they have an inside line because you are already in their lair. You visited that dealer because they’re conveniently located to you, and that convenience is worth a premium. Second, I think that there’s a specific personality disorder you need to be a car salesman, and there’s a level of narcissism that simply doesn’t want to be outnegotiated. When you make a firm offer by email, those complexes and emotions just don’t come into play in any real way. It’s a purely financial decision. Since you did your homework, you already know that you’re making an offer that is close to what other dealers have accepted, so the odds are on your side.

If you’re looking for a car, I hope this little essay is of some help. Good luck in your search. Kill a dinosaur for me.

But I have moved on. Video games are no longer the subject of my obsessive internet browsing. I’ve been reading reviews of cars instead. Yes, I promised that I would not write about cars anymore, and I’m not. Instead, for all you aspiring video game reviewers out there, here is how it should be done. Watch and learn from what is perhaps the most inspired and sublime review of a commodity consumer object that I have ever seen. I give you the Top Gear review of the Ford Fiesta:

This review, it seems to me, is structurally perfect. Instead of just droning on through a mechanical series of objective tickmarks, the piece turns the whole scheme on its side. While appearing to discuss the car’s practicality, or gas mileage, or performance, Clarkson actually lampoons the whole notion of measuring a car by such shallow and useless single numbers. Then you get to the delicious sequence where Clarkson, being chased by “baddies” in a Corvette, drives the car all over a shopping mall. Inside. Through the stores. And it just gets stranger form there.

In addition to all this, the piece is filled with interesting photography, good writing, humor, and increasing evidence that the insurance laws in Britain must just be fundamentally different than in the USA.

Top Gear has always excelled at this sort of thing. The reason the show is so good is because while its subject matter is “cars”, the show really isn’t about cars. Cars are boring. Cars have basically been the same product for the last 30 or 40 years. What more can you really say about cars? Top Gear is really about other interesting characters or tasks or ridiculous challenges that happen to be related to cars. Therefore, even if you really have no interest whatsoever in cars (and I, until recently, certainly didn’t), the show keeps you coming back for more because you know it will be fantastic anyway. This is why it’s one of the 10 best shows on television anywhere in the world.

This is also what I want video game reviews to do. No, I don’t expect them to be able to film an actual military landing with live ammo and gunboats and stuff. But I do expect them to realize that while their subject matter is video games, the video games by themselves are really not that interesting. I want to see a video game show, or magazine, or weblog, or something, that is compelling enough that people who are not interested in video games won’t be able to turn away. That’s something that will keep me coming back for more. Because if you don’t do that, you can say practically everything interesting that there is to say about video games in about two years of semi-regular writing. There really isn’t that much new under the sun.

Still, it would be awesome to see Adam Sessler jump out of an airplane, wouldn’t it?

I just got my DeLorme PN-40 last night. I went for the PN-40 instead of the Garmin because I was lured by the promise of awesome topo maps and easy-to-obtain-and-load aerial photography (and because there was a fire sale on them and I got one at a very good price). There was some criticism on Amazon about the software being not that great. I am here to tell you that criticism is not at all exaggerated.

First off, some disclaimers: I haven’t used the unit in the field yet. And, I am using Topo 7 at this point, rather than the new Topo 8 because that’s what I have. The unit comes with a card to fill out that you can mail in for an upgrade to Topo 8 (DeLorme, apparently, has yet to discover The Internet.)

It seems to me likely that the unit itself is about as easy to use as other units, excepting maybe the iPhone 3G, which is a different sort of thing.

In terms of basic functionality/mapping, the unit came with disks of “pre-cut” topo maps for various regions at 1:100. Loading those was perfectly simple, and should be easy for anyone.

Then there’s Topo 7.

While Topo 7 is not, in fact, the worst designed piece of software I’ve ever used, it certainly comes close. The user interface of the thing is so terrible that you have to wonder if it was intentionally designed that way as some sort of sophisticated joke. Much of the UI is “implicit”, in the sense that you use various gestures to navigate around the map and change zoom level, and it’s easy - especially at first - to inadvertently change your location or zoom level without even understanding how you did it. The application is full of what I’ll call “post-modal” dialog boxes. So you click some box or make some choice, and then, a few seconds later, after you’re trying to do something else, a dialog box or some other interrupt will appear related to the thing you did about 5 seconds ago.

The best example of this is in the “integrated” feature that lets you buy maps online. “Integrated”, in this context, means “not really all that well integrated”. In order to buy color aerial, USGS, and satellite maps of a single region, here’s what I had to do:

(1) Find the area I’m looking for in ‘NavLink’ mode.
(2) Click the grids I want to buy for.
(3) Realize that clicking the grid doesn’t do I what I want. Find the “Select/Edit” button, which is mysteriously off to the left somewhere.
(4) Click the grids I want.
(5) Pull the dropdown to “Color aerial”.
(6) Click “Add to selection”
(7) Pull the dropdown to “USGS”
(8) GET INTERRUPTED because 5 seconds later an IE window opens telling me “OK, sir, I added those maps. Could you name them?” No indication of what the name means.
(9) Type “Townname.” Click submit. Window goes away.
(10) Move mouse back to add things to my selection
(11) Get interrupted AGAIN for some confirmation dialog.
(12) Click “Add to selection” to add the USGS maps.
(13) Repeat steps 8 through 12 once for each map type I wanted to add.
(14) Except now I can’t call the next group of maps “Townname”, so I call them “Townname-1″, even though conceptually I wanted all these maps to be part of a single order. Maybe there’s a way to do that. It’s not obvious.
(15) Eventually, I actually get to purchase my maps. That took about another 4 clicks.
(16) Then another 5 clicks to download (find download tab, click checkbox next to each map, then download).
(17) Get interrupted by the download window.
(18) In case I didn’t make this clear above, any time you’re doing anything with NavLink, there’s a delay of a few seconds because presumably you’re talking to a remote server somewhere.

So to do the workflow “buy 4 types of maps for a set of regions,” I would estimate that I had to use about 48 separate mouse gestures, and I’m being generous and not counting the “purely local” ones, like selecting the quads that I wanted.

Adding the maps to the PN-40 is not quite as horrific as using NavLink, but it’s not a bright shining star, either. My favorite part of that moment is when you enter the transfer UI and after you try to begin a transfer a dialog box appears with an entire paragraph of text suggesting that you might want to change the GPS into one of two other modes which might be faster to use. If you change the GPS into those other modes at that moment, Topo 7 will lock up for 10 seconds while the USB bus is reconfigured. But if you try to put the GPS into that mode before beginning the transfer, the transfer UI won’t discover it (or at least, it didn’t when I tried it).

One could argue that this isn’t “hard.” It’s not as if it’s rocket science. But I think when people say that Topo 7 has a “steep learning curve” what they are really trying to say is this is a really incredibly annoying program to use. Put another way: if the amazon.com web site was as annoying to use as Topo 7, they would never sell any products ever. The only reason people are putting up with Topo 7 is because it’s offering something hard to get otherwise.

Now, maybe it’s possible that all of these problems are magically fixed in Topo 8. I’d love to hear from someone who has used Topo 8 to on this topic. But the software developer in me is asking the question “If they couldn’t get this right in the first seven versions, why do you think they’ll get it right in the eighth?”

I wonder if I should take advantage of the 30-day return policy to give up on this now, or if I should stick with it on the theory that loading maps isn’t an everyday activity.

I wonder if I can convince someone at Garmin to send me a unit to try their software and see if it’s any better.