Last year, I posted a script excerpt from the upcoming second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone. This bit of the script shows off the evolution of Andrew’s character since I wrote the first episode; an evolution which is, for the most part, a careen in the exact same direction.

There’s a very specific reason that I didn’t merely stick to Andrew’s character, but rather turned it up to 11. Shortly after the first episode of Your Face is a Saxophone debuted, my life imitated my art.

In Episode 3, Andrew will make this rant, which is I swear to god almost verbatim something that the person I’m about to tell you about said to me. I can’t make this shit up:

I met a guy — let’s call him Deuce Shmagner, because I’m not looking to call him out by his real name, tempting as it may be — who was running a small, in-person Bitcoin exchange. This was back when Bitcoins were a dollar each, and there was no online way to turn small quantities of them into cash (besides the kinda-sketchy Liberty Reserve option at MtGox). I was raising money for Your Face is a Saxophone at the time through Kickstarter, and some people wanted to donate Bitcoin. For people donating outside of Kickstarter, I was having Dave hold onto the money and pledge it to the project, so it’d end up counting. Hence why I needed to convert the Bitcoin to dollars.

So, I met Deuce in his apartment, sold him my 6 Bitcoin, and we ended up talking. As it turned out, we shared a lot of the same ideas and ideals (or so I thhought at the time). Technological optimism. Money as just a means to an end. Skepticism of authority. An entrepreneurial spirit. A desire to empower people. Deuce ended up watching Your Face is a Saxophone later on, and thought it was brilliant.

Several days later, I was beginning to freak out about finances. I’d burnt through a lot of money working on YFIAS non-stop for the past several months, without any income to offset my expenses. The Kickstarter campaign had stagnated, and the Intarnetz wasn’t nearly as excited about the whole thing as I’d hoped. Living in my parents’ house was taking a psychological toll on me, and I’d no idea where I could get the money to get out.

Then, Deuce spoke to me again. He had a business proposal for me, about selling Bitcoin to people for him and taking commission; if they liked, we’d set them up with a MyBitcoin account, and manage it for them. I responded by saying I had a business proposal of my own: redesigning their website, because despite the fact that they were legit, the site was kind of sketchy looking (For example, describing one’s company as “an extremely reputable Bitcoin dealer” has sort of the opposite effect).

Instead, Deuce told me that their Bitcoin business was a side project, and offered me a job in something more my speed. He and his boyfriend, who we’ll call Ted, were looking to found a new Internet TV network (which we’ll call “DeuceTV”) a la Revision3 or TWiT, but for the masses. There’d still be tech shows, but they’d be aimed at non-geeks, and among a whole slew of others on non-technical, more mainstream topics. And it’d have a global focus, with some Spanish-language shows, and eventually expanding into whichever other languages we could find people to speak. As icing on the cake, it’d all be CC-BY licensed. He wanted me to come on as the VP of Programming.

Pay would be low; they were funding it all from their bank accounts. We agreed on $1200 a month, which was about minimum wage for the hours I’d be working. That was enough to afford rent and food (but not much else) in an apartment I’d found with a friend in Harlem (The hours I was to be working meant commuting from Long Island wasn’t much of an option). It would be tough, but Deuce assured me that this rate would be temporary. Pay would go up as soon as the profits started coming in, which wouldn’t take too long.

We’d work early mornings till noon. After noon, they needed the apartment free for Ted to work as a chiropractor, and Deuce to do, um, IT consulting or something; it was never quite clear. Those were their pay-the-rent jobs. Once DeuceTV was profitable, we’d shift hours.

I was skeptical, but maybe, just maybe, this guy knew what he was doing. And I was desperate to get my own place and start becoming self-sufficient. So I said okay.

It felt good at first. Deuce would greet me with a hug every day I came in, because that’s just how we members of The Homosexual Agenda roll. He was my “boss” technically, but also a friend, it felt like. He and Ted and I could talk to each other on the same level. Just three guys starting up a company together.

It was around day two that everything started to go downhill.

Apparently, we were going to start with twelve shows, and we’d be launching on April 1st. This was on March 1st when Deuce told me this. This prospect was objectively insane.

Oh, but don’t worry, it’s okay, Deuce said. They’re basically going to be the same show, but about different topics. We’ll just sit down in front of these webcams with guests and talk. Or talk about stuff by ourselves. We don’t need “fancy production values”. As you can imagine, this is the point at which my excitement began to evaporate.

You see, I’d taken a look at Deuce and Ted’s previous work. It was blurry, grainy webcam footage of them sitting behind their computers, sometimes with a guest uncomfortably sandwiched between them, or a 4:3 image of a Skype chat stretched onto the 16:9 monitor (aaaagh) behind them. It was completely unedited — there were no titles, no graphics, and no removal of the ten seconds at the beginning where Deuce was pressing the frigging record button and waiting awkwardly for the opening music cue to start. I’d assumed that I was being brought on to improve some of this. Apparently, not to a very great extent.

So, it turned out we were going for quantity-over-quality. There would be nothing to differentiate us from every other amateur videoblogger, and certainly not come out ahead of TWiT or Revision3. And yet somehow this was going to lead to lucrative sponsorship deals.

Oh, but people like me, said Deuce. People don’t care about fancy production values, they just care about the content. Everyone likes to listen to what I say. Lots of people watch my videos. I have thousands of Twitter followers, and they’re totally not all spam bots or people trying to sell Internet Marketing Secrets, I swear. Pay no attention to Oybek, the kid from Uzbekistan who I pay $200 a month to mass-follow people on Twitter and then unfollow them if they don’t follow me back; I’m legitimately popular. We’ll have no problem and we’ll be making lots of money, just like how I said Bitcoins would be worth $1000 each before the end of the year. I know what I’m talking about, because I was a manager at a Fortune 400 company.

Note that he never specified which Fortune 400 company he worked at, nor why he’s the only person in the world who says “Fortune 400″ instead of “500″ or “100″. But I digress.

At this point, I had become what I hated: the guy only in it for the money. A shit amount of money — $1200 a month in Manhattan is nothing — but money nonetheless. The prospect of DeuceTV being anything that I could reasonably be proud of had evaporated by about day four, so I was only putting in the bare minimum amount of work that would get me my pay. Note the word “pay”, not “paycheck” — we’re talking off-the-books cash here, because we’re Libertarians and government is stupid and Ayn Rand is erotica.

Well, okay, I admit, I still had a small glimmer of hope. And you know what, for as aggravating as Deuce was, he was still a nice guy. Even though his business strategies were starting to bother the hell out of me, he still felt like a good friend to have.

Until I would wonder what the fuck I was thinking, after he did something like this:

I was helping Deuce set up a Podtrac account for DeuceTV, and as we looked through the FAQ, there was a question we had that wasn’t answered. I think it was something about iTunes integration, I don’t remember. So he looked up their phone number and called them.

It’s an answering machine. Of course it’s an answering machine, because he’s calling at 8 in the morning. This is the message he leaves:

Hi, this is Deuce Shmagner at DeuceTV, call me back at [whatever his number was].

No mention of the actual question. No reason for them to call us back. Nobody has actually heard of him or DeuceTV, so why is he acting like they have?

I mention these things to him, and he says, “Well, if they don’t call back, that’s their problem.”

Well, no, actually, it’s our problem because we’re the ones who are trying to find out if you know what fuck it I’m not even gonna try.

My cynicism was cemented when we had the SEO discussion. Deuce, through the extremely scientific and empirical means of some PageRank checker website, had determined that WordPress.com has a “nine out of ten PageRank”, whatever the fuck that means. Therefore, we’d need to create individual WordPress blogs for every single show, because that would be search engine gold or someshit.

The problem with WordPress.com is that we’d have limited control over the site design and user experience. If, as Deuce hoped, the ruse worked, and these WordPress blogs catapulted to the top of all sorts of search queries, then people would be confused as hell. They’d see these sites of radically different design to DeuceTV.com, and probably be under the impression that they weren’t affiliated.

I’ve seen some porn sites use tactics like this. Deuce wanted to use it for Oprah-like shows.

I started to get emotional in arguing against this. If, in fact, this search engine voodoo worked, it would be pissing on brand-building for the possibility of short-term ad dollars. To achieve his big social change goals, we didn’t want mindless search engine traffic stumbling on DeuceTV, we wanted people who actually cared about the programming and wanted to see it. Just because you get a lot of pageviews doesn’t mean they’re the ones you want. But who was I kidding? DeuceTV clearly wasn’t about making the world a better place, and Deuce was lying to himself if he thought so.

Anyway, it turned out that Deuce and Ted were going to be on vacation in Spain three weeks into us working together. Apparently they found some kind of travel hacking deal on plane tickets, and invited the entire family along. Great, Deuce, take a big vacation two weeks before launching your company.

Actually, it was okay, because that’s what I was here for. During the week they were gone, I would work from home, building the entire DeuceTV website all by myself, and create motion graphic opening sequences for all twelve motherfucking shows. The latter, I had pushed for — it was the one small concession of “fancy production values” that Deuce had allowed — but it was still quite a lot to do in a week. Especially combined with cobbling together an entire website, something I wasn’t very good at and didn’t really enjoy all that much.

Admittedly, I should have stood up and said it was too much work before accepting the responsibility. But he was paying me seven bucks an hour for it all, so I figured I had room to screw up.

Lo and behold, my work was complicated by a crisis. I don’t want to get too deep into it, but long story short, my roommate was moving us to a new apartment three weeks after I’d just moved into the new one, and didn’t think to tell me about it until it was happening. Also unpaid Con Ed bills and power outages. Needless to say, I was going to have to cut features from the website in order to get it done on time, and only finish motion graphics for the shows we were planning to tape the first week. I emailed Deuce explaining the situation. He didn’t seem to object.

And so, I got a functional and perfectly fine website ready, and prepared graphics for three shows, while somehow managing to scrape by with my mental health. I walked into Deuce’s apartment the day after they got back to New York, and showed off the website.

Deuce was not impressed. And had quite a bit to say to me.

His tirade hit these major points:

• I don’t want to hear about your personal drama in emails. Go gab about it to your girlfriends.
• You’re not paying me. I’m paying you. If you were paying me, then you could tell me what to do. But I tell you what to do because I’m paying you.
• By “telling me what to do”, I’m referring to the fact that you told me that you were going to make cuts from the website. Oh, and that thing with the WordPress blogs last week. That’s not your decision, because I’m paying you.
• Oybek never says “this is how it’s gonna be,” he just says, “yes boss, whatever you say boss”, because Oybek’s not paying me; I’m paying Oybek.
• You know, in Spain, when I was having this really refreshing bath, I was telling Ted, I’m never going to hire anyone again. I’m just going to take unpaid interns, and they’ll have to prove themselves.
• Oh, and by the way, there are lots of people who are desperate to do work for me. Look at Mohammed in Egypt. He’s working for free. I’m not even paying him.
• Maybe we should give you less hours? Because this website doesn’t look like you worked eight hours a day on it, because I was inside your head after all and know exactly how long it took, and if you can’t work eight hours a day, maybe we should pay you less. Or do you want to be an unpaid intern?
• You’re not paying me. I’m paying you.

Now, given the fact that A) I was being treated as a friend throughout this entire endeavor, and B) my job title included “Vice President”, it wasn’t all that unreasonable of me to assume that I could A) actually mention why I would need to make cuts to finish my work, and B) make decisions autonomously. See, Deuce was paying me, but not to work for him — I was working for the company. Or so I’d had every reason to be under that impression.

But I didn’t have my wits about me to say as much at the time. Firstly, I was caught off-guard by this sudden outburst, and secondly, as soon as he started talking about cutting my hours and paying me less, my brain immediately went into calculator mode. With less pay, there would be no way I could afford to stay in my new apartment, and if I couldn’t stay in the apartment, this shit job was hardly worth dragging myself to the Long Island Railroad for.

So, after Deuce finally stopped talking, and a long moment to choose my words, I said, “I realize that there are many people who are desperate for this job, and would do more work than I have for less. But I’m not desperate.” And I walked out.

Not that there actually are all that many people desperate to work with Deuce Shmagner, but hey, I already said I wasn’t firing on all cylinders in the heat of the moment. Technically, Deuce still owes me about $200 for the work I did while he was in Spain, but I was more concerned with getting the fuck out than pressing the issue.

Later, Deuce ended up pissing off the Bitcoin community, and they found out that his last business had been involved in mortgage fraud. He was living in New York because he was on the run from the state of Illinois. So he was a convicted scam artist too. Lovely.

Ultimately, I don’t regret working with Deuce; it was a screenwriting goldmine. I will never, ever again struggle to write the character of a pompous, egocentric, hypocritical douche. But there’s one thing about Deuce which I’m not sure comes through unless you really get to meet him, face-to-face. I don’t think Deuce knows that he’s a douchebag and a con man. I think he genuinely believes his own bullshit, and really does feel like he’s working to make the world a better place.

In one of our conversations about corporate influence in politics, Deuce mentioned an idea to me: the “accidental conspiracy.” It happens when a bunch of organizations, doing what they believe to be right, end up entirely by accident causing damage so massive to the world that it seems like it was intentional and coordinated. That about sums up Deuce Wagner. He is a walking, talking, living, breathing, anthropomorphization of an accidental conspiracy.

We all know the basics of geometry. A line is one-dimensional. A square is two-dimensional, made up of four lines connected at their endpoints. A cube is three-dimensional, made up of six squares connected at their edges. And a tesseract is four-dimensional, made up of eight cubes connected at their sides.

Actually, you might not have heard of the last one. But take a look at the image up top: it’s a tesseract rotating through hyperspace. Whether that breaks your brain or not, the point is: there can be more than three dimensions to any given thing.

So how does this apply to characters in fiction? Let’s have a look at some examples.

First Dimension: Time

A one-dimensional character can be taken completely at face value, and never changes. They always react the same way, their mindset is always unambiguous, and they never learn from their experiences, alter their personality, or grow. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.

Second Dimension: Behavior

A two-dimensional character is, generally, one whose behavior does change over time. They literally have an arc.

If a character has both motivations and behaviors which don’t change at all over the course of the story, then they’re another variety of two-dimensional character. Speaking of which, let’s talk about motivation.

Third Dimension: Motivation

A three-dimensional character changes over time, but they may be more than what they seem at face value. They have subtexts and inner motivations which explain their actions and give a reason for their behavior, which may or may not be clear to the audience. Both motivations and behavior may change over the course of the story, but not always.

Other people may define “character depth” as the complexity of these subtexts and motivations. I’d say a better term would be “density” — a dense character has a rich, complex backstory, which leads them to behave in a variety of ways in various contexts. “Dense” is also a derogatory term that means “stupid”, though, which is probably why this hasn’t caught on.

Intermezzo: Who Sees These Dimensions

Back to geometry for a second. The world we live in is three-dimensional, but we’re only seeing a two-dimensional projection of it. Have a look at the palm of your hand. Notice that you can see every part of your hand on the X and Y axes.

Now — without moving your hand at all — take a look at your knuckles on the other side.

Can’t do it, can you? That’s because you’re only getting two dimensions of information at any given time. Your retina is a flat, 2D plane picking up a flat disk of light. You’re not seeing the entirety of the third dimension all at once, just a cross-section of it. To see what else is out there, you have to start rotating things, and build a mental model of what the totality of a 3D object — like your hand — actually looks like.

It’s the same with characters. The first two dimensions — time and behavior — are completely visible to the audience. The third dimension — the motivation — is only visible to the character. But sometimes, the actions of the character may reveal little bits and pieces of their motivations, and the audience can start to build a mental model of them.

But what about aspects that even the character can’t see?

Fourth Dimension: Consciousness

A four-dimensional character not only has behaviors and motivations that change over time, but also a varying self-awareness. The character may think they understand their own motivations, but in reality be very, very wrong.

I’m not going to draw a diagram, because visually representing a four-dimensional object makes my brain hurt. Instead, I’ll just describe an example: A bully beats up on an effeminate gay boy (behavior), because the bully hates gay people (motivation) — or so he thinks (consciousness). By the end of the story (time), the bully realizes (consciousness) that he’s actually gay too, and has been ashamed of it. So he apologizes and makes amends with the effeminate boy (behavior) in an effort to atone and find happiness (motivation).

In other words, the fourth dimension is the discrepancy between what the character thinks their motivation is, and what it actually is. In many stories, the character becomes conscious of their true motivation over time, which then alters their behavior and/or motivation.

This could also manifest itself as a character who isn’t conscious of their behavior. For one reason or another, they fail to see the consequences of their actions, and over time realize that they’ve actually been acting against their motivation. For example, the idealistic businessman who wants to change the world for the better, and fails to see that he’s actually become the very thing he hates until it’s too late.

Four-dimensional characters may not be all that uncommon after all. What examples in literature, film, or other media of fiction can you think of? Sound off in the comments.

It’s been over a year since our friend MG has committed an act of textual assault (or at least since I’ve noticed). I’d begun to think he’d been reformed, and that perhaps he’d turned over a few new leaves, as opposed to “leafs”. But now, in writing Fast Break: As Of Last Week, Many At Sprint Thought They Were Merging With T-Mobile, MG Siegler has begun to slip back into his old, dark ways — the man he once was coming back to haunt him, reclaiming his soul.

I’m talking, of course, about this atrocity of a first paragraph:

This morning’s bombshell news that AT&T would be buying T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion has left a lot of questions. T-Mobile customers want to know what it means for them? AT&T customers want to know what it means for them? Would-be iPhone buyers want to know what it means for them? T-Mobile and AT&T have started addressing those already. One thing not addressed yet: what does this mean for Sprint, the nation’s third-largest carrier?

No, MG, this morning’s news doesn’t leave a lot of questions. You do, starting with your second sentence.

“T-Mobile customers want to know what it means for them?”

I’m not sure, MG, do T-Mobile customers want to know what it means for them? You’re the one writing the article, not me.

“AT&T customers want to know what it means for them?”

Or, are these rhetorical questions, MG? Are you expressing shock and disbelief at the fact that AT&T customers want to know what this merger means for them?

“Would-be iPhone buyers want to know what it means for them?”

Oh, no, I get it, MG; it’s not that at all. You just don’t know how to use a question mark.

Really, MG? A question mark? I can understand a semicolon or an em dash — they’re not usually taught in second grade or anything — but a question mark? You don’t know that it’s supposed to be used on questions that you, the writer, are asking, as opposed to simple sentences that are about questions? If you’re making a statement that “T-Mobile customers want to know what it means for them,” then shouldn’t you be using a period? Why do I have to explain this to you? Is it really that difficult to understand? Do you just like using question marks? If that’s the case, there are all sorts of ways to write a sentence which calls for a question mark at the end, so why waste the opportunity on something horribly, horribly wrong?

MG quickly recovers, using a colon properly in the final sentence of the paragraph, and continuing for the rest of the article with no readability-compromising errors. But the resurgence of his former tendencies concern and frighten me, and I recommend that we keep a close eye on him. MG is our friend, and I think I speak for all of us when I say that I hate seeing him like this.

I decided to give it a try, and I’ma let you finish but Beyonce had one of these days I’ll bet your life on the road today and they are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients. The experience is as exhilarating and possibly confusing as a first step in the right direction for them to become more involved in their children can vary greatly due to company policy and procedures for their use. Unfortunately, it’s all about themselves and their families in their homes and their lives are nothing.

The problem is that there is anything you would not believe how much I loved them all. Google Scribe of this article with a FREE trial to HighBeam Research: Online Press Releases and Newsletters fast and elegant 3D photo gallery on their website and buy this product again and again and I’ma let you finish. There are no comments for this user yet and can not believe that there is anything… I’ma get you something to do with themselves on and off the field and then press the button to the right of the people who are not interested in them.

To be fair, there are not any posts in the last few years and I have been able to find anything in these search results from RT on your Google searches by subscribing to the feed via email to state their case and their ownership of their owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books. I’m sure that some people might believe that they are not therefore to be understood that these embodiments are provided solely by this site are property of their respective owners, but with their own unique style of musical composition and performance of their duties and responsibilities of their jobs and their proportion against the total number of page views delivered based on the seller and the listing broker as an agent of the present invention is to provide and maintain their own calendars and schedules for their employees.

There is a certain element of surrealism to the results, and you can not print this page this way, they can become and to remain in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached. It’s almost as if Andre Breton had anything to do with themselves on and off the field and then press the button to the right of the people who are not interested in them. Google Scribe is a haunting look into the digital psyche of the American Chemical Society and American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Pain Society Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved • Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.

As an actual writing aid, though, I don’t find it very useful.

Why, if such a remarkable thing were to exist, I could send Aunt Agnes a telegram from anywhere in the world simply by retrieving the machine from my jacket, keying in the message, and sending it on its way via radio broadcast. Perhaps she might even carry a similar machine of her own with which to receive my telegrams wherever she might be, whether seated in her parlor, or out in the country on a velocipede.

In fact, while we’re imagining such splendid ideas, perhaps this telegraph machine could be constructed in the shape of miniature typewriter, which I could operate with my thumbs. After all, this Morse code business is frightfully difficult to familiarize oneself with, and is furthermore rather slow, even once one has mastered it. I’m quite sure many gentlemen have already mused about composing and subsequently transmitting a telegram using a typewriter, so, Wilfred, just imagine, if you will, combining such a fantasy with mine of a miniature, pocket-sized telegraph.

Now that I’m considering it, the aforementioned difficulty with Morse code certainly extends to the interpretation of it. Those tones of varying length are endearingly droll, but they’re quite an ordeal to properly understand. Perhaps this miniature telegraph machine could interpret the Morse code all by itself, and write out the letters for me to read. Oh, but that might use an exorbitant amount of stationery over time. Hmm…eureka, Wilfred, I’ve got it! Perhaps a system could be devised to produce the letters with light, much in the same way those Lumière fellows from France display moving pictures of trains! I say, if such a machine could project letters onto a small portion of itself, the Morse code problem would be solved entirely!

Why, Wilfred, I reckon that before the passing of a century, some extraordinarily clever gentleman shall create such a machine! Of course, I’d surmise he might attempt to construct a radio-broadcasting telephone first; admittedly, the transmission of voice is quite a bit more impressive than doing the same with writing. By Jove, I do hope that he’d apply the resulting knowledge to building a mobile telegraph as well! There are several situations in which I would imagine the instant transmission of a short telegram to another person would be far more convenient than striking up a vocal conversation. But I do suppose that the capacity to either send a telegram or converse on the telephone from one single machine no larger than a pocketwatch would be a magnificent thing indeed. Perhaps it could even have a pocketwatch built into it, thus eliminating the need for one to carry multiple pieces of machinery to perform different tasks.

I say, Wilfred, such a machine would be rather sensational. Alas, it remains but a fanciful notion. Oh, good heavens; I’ve dropped my monocle in my tea.

You guys.

Look at this. Look at this article by MG Siegler.

Are you seeing this? Last two sentences of the first paragraph:

After all, they were getting great publicity for giving away something that was already free (GrandCentral — which is now known as Google Voice). We wondered if they wouldn’t pull the same stunt in the future. Well, it’s the future; and they are.

MG wrote that. He wrote that. Em dashes and semicolons were the very first things I ever passive-aggressively taught him. And now he just used them the way they’re supposed to be.

UPDATE: Well, technically, “and” doesn’t go after a semicolon, but I’ve already given MG a pass on beginning sentences with “and” as a stylistic quirk, so he can do it with semicolons too.

Also parentheticals. All three, in the same paragraph. Wow.

And look at this, right at the start of the next paragraph:

Again, this is actually a very nice thing they’re doing, but it’s also an ingenious way to promote what Google clearly considers to be one of its killer products: Google Voice.

Omigod he just did the same thing with a colon too eeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!

MG, you have no idea how proud I am of you; I never thought this day would come so fast. Just think, someday maybe you’ll even spot a place where my own punctuation compromises readability.

Now, all I have to make fun of about you is your Apple fanboyism and obsession with Twitter, making me just like everyone else in the world. Unless, of course, you so much as misplace the acute mark in the word “cliché” (which you have no excuse for because on your Mac it’s as simple as hitting option-E before typing the E). If you do that, I will not hesitate to waste four hours of my life ranting about it in order to get maybe two or three extra pageviews.

How inspiring. I’ve been wanting to do more of these. Thus, without further ado:

Yesterday, MG published an article called “An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Nexus One“, because apparently there aren’t enough reviews which compare the Nexus One to the iPhone. Actually, there’s no shortage of them, just like how there’s no shortage of MG Siegler’s use of the phrase “no shortage of”. Speaking of MG Siegler’s predictable writing, let’s see what he’s predictably done wrong this time:

Last week, I attended the Google Android “Nexus One” event. As you may have heard, they gave many of us in the audience the device to try out. I decided that before I wrote anything about it (other than saying on television that it’s a “nice little device“), I would give it a real shot. So here I am, a week later, with my thoughts on it. To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a full review or overview, for that, see our review here. Instead, I’m going to come at this from the perspective of a pretty hardcore iPhone user of the past two-plus years.

A quick skim of this first paragraph may lead you to believe that MG has miraculously managed to finish a single paragraph without screwing anything up. Unfortunately, the second-to-last sentence falls apart if you’re the sort of person who actually reads things. MG is trying to make the sentence read like this, but read it aloud:

To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a full review or overview, for that, see our review here.

It sounds like this.

MG, have I frightened you into using commas instead of semicolons or em dashes? It’s not that you should always use a comma instead of a more “sophisticated” punctuation mark, it’s that you should use each one correctly. Those bold words were the chance you’d been waiting for to flourish a semicolon or em dash — in fact, either could have worked there. But you missed it. Fear overcame you, and you cowered behind the perceived safety of a comma, huddling for warmth and whimpering like a puppy. Alas, the comma was not safe this time, and now nobody will adopt you from the animal shelter and give you a loving home, where you can frolic and chase frisbees and get Siegly treats when you’re a good boy.

You’ve been very bad this time, MG. Stop chewing my shoes and get your muddy paws off the couch.

Moving on:

And to start off, I’ll come right out and say what everyone will want to know: Do I think the Nexus One is better than the iPhone?

I don’t care what you think, because you’re not supposed to capitalize the next word after a colon. It’s not two periods on top of each other, it’s a mid-sentence indicator of logical consequence. I’m not going to waste time explaining the big words to you, so concentrate on the mid-sentence part: colons don’t end the sentence. The only time you should send a big hulking capital letter barreling into the reader’s visual cortex is, other than proper nouns or names, at the beginning of a sentence. Otherwise you might cause people’s perceptions of reality to break down and turn their lives into the plot of Vanilla Sky. You are transforming millions of innocent TechCrunch readers into Tom Cruise, MG. Is that something you’d wish on anybody? Do you want that on your conscience? I thought not. Now fix it.

As the article continues, MG’s performance is remarkably passable. There are moments like this:

It’s hard to describe just how great Google Voice is on Android. When I set it up, I had to confirm maybe three or four things, and I was all ready to go. In two minutes, my Google Voice number completely took over my Nexus One. This included getting not only all Google Voice incoming calls and voicemails, but doing outbound calls with my Google Voice number as well. This is absolutely the future of number portability, and that no doubt has the carriers — and likely even Apple – spooked.

The end of this paragraph nearly brought a tear to my eye. It doesn’t really matter to me that the preceding sentences are choppy and mediocre; MG used em dashes to convey an emphatic pause, just like I taught him. He’s all grown up now!

Maps offers a number of features on the Nexus One that aren’t on the iPhone native version. This includes Latitude (which can run in the background), and Navigation. Other Google apps, like Google Sky Map and Google Goggles are also pretty cool, and useful to varying degrees, and again, only available for Android.

Or maybe not.

I’m aware that the Oxford comma is a matter of preference. Whether you choose to use it, or choose not to use it, there’s usually no problem. But for god’s sake, be consistent from one sentence to the other!

Now, there is, of course, a difference: the first sentence, in which MG did use the comma, had those pesky parentheses to make matters confusing. The problem with that is that no, there’s no difference at all, because you don’t just randomly insert a comma after a closing parenthesis for no reason. “Latitude (which can run in the background)” is the first item, “Navigation” is the other, and if you’re going to put a comma before the separating “and,” then you should also do that in the very next fucking sentence where you do the very same fucking thing.

Obviously, this issue (background apps) has been talked about in the past ad-naseum, so I won’t dwell on it here.

First of all, there’s no hyphen. Second of all, it’s “ad nauseam.” Christ, MG, you’re destroying Latin too.

Fortunately, MG continues the article for about 1200 more words without breaking things ad nauseam, no longer distracting the reader from his rather well-thought out arguments with slippery linguistic banana peels. In fact he manages to finish the whole article without another punctuation debac— oh, wait…

And it’s good to have two companies that can play off each other and push innovation — while at the same time, changing the industry.

I didn’t tell you to use em dashes instead of commas all the time, MG! Ugh, this is going to turn into an endless back-and-forth whack-a-mole game with you, I know it.

Why is it that we must tell everyone on the Internet that things are only our opinion?

Of course “I think” what I’m about to say. Why else would I be saying it? Of course it’s “in my opinion,” because I’m saying it. Anything said by anyone is, when you get down to it, inherently related to what they think, which is consequently their opinion. But now that they’ve been so kind as to emphasize that fact, it hurts their argument.

Here are two different statements a person can make:

A: I think that jumping off the George Washington Bridge can cause severe bodily harm. That could be fatal, in my opinion.

B: Nobody can get hurt from jumping off the George Washington Bridge. It’s actually very healthy and promotes long-life.

Now, assuming you didn’t know anything about the effects of jumping off a bridge, which of these two arguments would be more convincing to you? At first glance, without Wikipediing anything? Most of you will say statement B.

Adding language like, “I think” or “In my opinion” (or IMO or IMHO) to your arguments weakens them. You will sound less sure of yourself, or at the very least like you don’t care as much. This applies to actual speech as well as online discussion.

Some might argue that such disclaimers are common courtesy, but to the audience you’re addressing, they’re common sense. It’s not impolite to omit needless words, and doing so makes the remaining words stronger.

Today on MG Siegler Destroys the English Language, MG seems to be having a better day in terms of competence. But in “The Mac Versus PC Debate Has Never Been Clearer“, he proves once again that he has no idea what an em dash is supposed to do. Oh, and some other things.

The point MG makes in the article is a great one: the Mac vs. PC debate is very much like a Porsche vs. Camry comparison. But that doesn’t make his writing any less aggravating to read.

You need look no further than numbers released today by NPD to understand Apple’s strategy. Its revenue share of the “premium” price market — that is, computers over $1,000 — is a staggering 91%.

Better, MG. Much better than your previous efforts. In fact, you came so close to a successful em dash use there. But you just had to throw in a “that is.” Without the “that is,” you could’ve used these em dashes so well, MG, and I’d have been so proud, but with two little words, you turned the whole damn phrase into a parenthetical. You know, the half-circle thingies that you use to make sad and happy faces? Or, to put it another way, the things you used in the next paragraph:

Analysts and journalists are often quick to point out Apple’s relatively low overall market share (less than 10%).

That’s a correct use of parentheses, MG, and the fact that you were able to do that makes me wonder if you see any difference in all these punctuation symbols. They do different things; em dashes are for long, emphatic mid-sentence pauses, and parentheses are for shorter, more subdued asides. Listen to yourself talk, and it’s not very hard to figure out.

At least this time you didn’t use em dashes where there should have been commas, though. I’ll give you that.

Other minor errors include “naive” instead of “naïve” (normally something I’d let slide, but you’re a Mac user, MG — press option+u before typing the i, it’s easy) and “lets” instead of “let’s” (typo, maybe, I can’t tell with you). Alone, they’d be minuscule, but overall they deplete my confidence in you even further. I don’t like seeing you fail, MG, and I don’t like having to write these things; this blog doesn’t give me ad revenue. I think I speak for all literate people when I say, please join us.

As the web matures, it’s also getting more complex. Yet much of it is still fundamentally based on things like HTML which are 30 years old. A new startup, FasterWeb, aims to bring these old technologies up to speed — as it were — making the web faster, by optimizing the old standards for doing new things. [Emphasis added]

The second sentence (red) reads like it was said in one breath, with no pauses at all. Read that sentence out loud without pausing. Does it sound right? No, not really. Any normal human being would say it as if there was a comma between “HTML” and “which,” so MG is either a space alien or a sloppy writer. The former can get him a well-paid role in a Hulu commercial, while the latter merits endless shame. Meanwhile, MG’s em dash mishap (blue) isn’t as egregious as his previous one, to be fair, but it makes the sentence read like it’s being said by William Shatner. The appropriate pause length would be indicated by commas.

If you click through to the article, you’ll notice MG wields the em dash slightly more proficiently one sentence later. While he should have used a colon instead, and a comma could have worked better as well, the em dash doesn’t completely mangle the sentence this time. I’ll chalk that up to luck on MG’s part.

Moving on, MG almost manages to complete a paragraph without any glaring mistakes, but botches it in the last three words:

And that’s why his firm had no hesitation in pouring an undisclosed amount of money into the Israeli-based venture.

I did bring this up in the article’s comments section, but since I’m covering the whole thing now, I might as well take the opportunity to mock it even further. The company MG is referring to in this sentence is based in Israel, and it is run by Israelis. MG disagrees, though, asserting that the company is headquartered inside the body of an Israeli person and staffed by blood cells or bacteria or nanobots or something. TechCrunch’s own database, however, describes the company as “Israel-based,” which makes quite a bit more sense. It’s possible that MG is a rabid Osmosis Jones fanboy, thus distorting his fact-checking, or he just doesn’t know how to use adjectives.

On second thought, owing to the fact that the last sentence of the article does call the company “Israel-based,” MG is either making an avant-garde artistic statement against the bourgeois prison that is consistency, or he knows how to copy and paste something from a press release.

After this, MG goes an astonishing three paragraphs without breaking something. He does begin a few sentences with the word “and,” which might cause a few amateur, wannabe grammar Nazis to cringe, but that’s just a stylistic choice and doesn’t compromise the article’s readability. That’s how many people talk (including me), after all. But two words into the sixth paragraph, he screws up yet again:

Obviously, a two to ten fold increase in speed is a big difference, but Leitersdorf notes that the more complex a page is, the higher the magnitude of optimization will be.

It may seem nitpicky and genuinely fascist of me to point this out, as it makes the article only minimally more awkward to read; I congratulate MG for his restraint in fucking things up. Nonetheless, “tenfold” is one word, as is “twofold,” thus the bold text would be written “two-to-tenfold” by an individual without a prehensile tail and less fond of bananas.

MG’s next two paragraphs both start in a way that indicates TechCrunch pays him per sentence:

The business model for the project seems sound as well. FasterWeb has a multi-pronged approach depending on the situation of the website or ISP.
[...]
He also notes that in their research, YL only found two companies even come close to doing what these guys are doing. But Leitersdorf declined to name them.

Both pairs of sentences were meant to be together, but were torn apart by the iron fist of MG Siegler’s ineptitude. Their forbidden love lives on in the hope that someday, a hero on a white horse will ride into the realm of TechCrunch and copy edit this chimpanzee’s work.

The former pair of sentences should be joined with a colon. Nothing fancy, just replace the period with one. A semicolon might work as well, but MG has already proved that he has no idea what to do with one of those. As they are now, these two sentences aren’t astronomically bad, but the latter pair absolutely requires a comma instead of the first period. Separated, they cause the reader’s IQ to go down by several clichéd insults.

From that point on, MG doesn’t screw things up anymore, closing his article with a grammatically sound, if unremarkable, set of six sentences. But alas, the damage has already been done, and not a soul with access to the article’s “Edit” button gives enough of a crap to take thirty seconds out of their day to fix any of it.

I hope that someday MG Siegler learns the error of his, well, errors and commits to writing articles that aren’t confusing and read like an actual person talking. But in a way, I also hope he never changes, because he’s certainly a great source of material for me.