The Richter Scale^®

Those who have followed my writing over the years know that I have a strong belief that the adult entertainment industry drives a lot of technology forward. The adult industry is credited with making VHS a successful standard resulting in Sony’s Betamax losing the video tape recording standards battle. Likewise, the first profitable commercial uses I witnessed of streaming live compressed video over a network connection (ISDN) were of on-line interactive peep shows. And arguably, multimedia PCs, with speakers and CD-ROM drives, were driven by the adult industry’s foray into MPEG movies, and interactive adult titles.

And now the issue of the importance of the adult industry’s adoption of technology (or the lack of adoption a technology) comes to the fore again with the standards battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

For those not familiar with HD-DVD and Blu-ray, they are competing standards for high definition (HD) content on discs similar to DVDs. But they offer many times the resolution of traditional DVD on a properly equipped high definition television or display. From personal experience I can tell you that the imagery is incredibly crisp with both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and I now find myself cheated when I have to watch a normal DVD because it seems so grainy and fuzzy.

HD-DVD is supported mainly by Toshiba on the hardware side, while Blu-ray comes from Sony. Each side has its exclusive hardware supporters, as well as exclusive studios which support that format, and there are a few companies that are “bi-definition” - they support both formats. Both sides want the other to just go away. Blu-ray is technologically superior to HD-DVD, but HD-DVD is cheaper and has some perception issues in its favor (I’ll post my Richter Scale column from TechWatch over on http://www.RichterScale.org in a couple of weeks that explains this in greater detail).

But back to the adult industry. A year ago the big production companies in the adult industry were all for Blu-ray - they appreciated the greater disc capacity (50GB vs. 30GB for HD-DVD) and the quality reputation that Sony has. Fast forward one year later where all the top adult studios are now declaring for HD-DVD as their next generation DVD standard.

Why? Well, in speaking with management at two of the studios - Wicked Pictures and Digital Playground - they could not find anyone to replicate their discs in Blu-ray. Joone - an award winning director and manager of Digital Playground told me that Sony forced him to go HD-DVD because they have an agreement with their replicators that they will lose their license to make Blu-ray discs if they duplicate adult content. The head of marketing at Wicked, Jackie Ramos, said much the same thing.

At a meeting I had with Sony Pictures last week during CES, I asked Don Eklund, Vice President of Technology, whether this was true. Eklund indicated that while the three replication facilities Sony itself owned indeed were under agreement not to replicate adult content (see this Computerworld article for more), he was not aware of this restriction applying to the other handful of Blu-ray replicators out there.

One adult publisher - Vivid - appears to not be facing the same issues, or maybe not yet anyway. Vivid plans to release their first high definition disc title ("Debbie Does Dallas Again") in both HD-DVD and Blu-ray format. I was unable to reach Steven Hirsh of Vivid to get more insight into how they are able to claim to do Blu-ray when everyone else that counts in adult entertainment is not able to do Blu-ray.

One thing is for sure, though. The legend of the Adult industry breaking Betamax and making VHS did make an impression on at least some members of the HD-DVD camp, as Wicked’s Ramos disclosed to myself and fellow journalist Dan Nystedt (see here and here) for his article (with quotes from yours truly) during a meeting with Ramos.

Ramos said that in the Fall of 2006 his company was approached by someone in the HD-DVD camp to adopt the HD-DVD format, and once that happened, all sorts of previously closed doors opened up for them. So, after months and months of no progress, they finally got started for earnest in November and last week released their first HD-DVD title - “Camp Cuddly Pines Powertool Massacre”, an HD-DVD re-release of the 2005 AVN Award winning movie by the same name.

Folks in the Blu-ray hardware camp are certainly not making similar overtures to the adult entertainment industry, and it may ultimately be Blu-ray’s downfall.

However, content is still king, and the best weapon Blu-ray has against HD-DVD is exclusive content, such as movies from Disney. Will this become a popularity contest between Disney and adult movies? Time will tell.

As an active (some might say hyper-active) consumer of digital media I find DRM (Digital Rights Management) to be annoying at the very least, and downright malodorous at worst. DRM is what prevents you from playing downloaded music from _________ (insert one of: iTunes, Napster (new one), Yahoo Music, Real/Rhapsody, etc.) on any device or platform you want, any time you want, for example.

And DRM is not limited to only music - it applies to eBooks (like those for my Sony Reader or the occasional standards documents I need to purchase from IHS/ANSI); videos (iTunes TV shows, for example), and movies (e.g. Xbox Live movie downloads which can only be stored for a few days, and played only a few times; Microsoft’s Vista operating system will require LCD (or other) displays to have HDCP - High Definition Copy Protection - in order to play back HD video content from Blu-ray and HD-DVD; Apple’s new iTV with iTunes; and the reason I cannot watch TV shows at ABC’s web site while back home on Bonaire because I am outside the U.S.).

The truly scary thing about DRMed content, at least to me, is that the company I bought it through could decide at some point that my right to view or listen to the content should be terminated, and there’s not much I could do about it (other than keep computers in Internet isolation, perhaps). Or that some technological mishap prevents me from playing purchased media forever.

And then there are changing standards and allegiances, as witnessed by Microsoft’s desertion of all of its Plays For Sure partners when the company decided to release the Zune player.

The big media publishers are driven by fear - fear of loss of control, fear of lost revenue, fear of alienating their artists - and that fear has more or less paralyzed them. Their knee jerk response has been to vastly restrict how digital content can be purchased and used, combined with an effort to scare those who don’t respect (or are ignorant of) intellectual property rights into submission. The result is an alienation of their customers. Like me.

With the rare exception of a TV show I may order and download from iTunes for my video iPod, knowing I will only view it once, my form of protest to DRM has taken the form of either viewing/listening to the material for free or simply purchasing physical media that I can play anywhere, anytime, and rip to my computer hard disk if I so wish. And apparently I’m not the only one doing this as is evident from the growing indications that the music industry is looking at options for selling non-DRMed MP3 music files to boost their electronic sales and also reduce their dependence on the monster they created - Apple’s iTunes.

A December 7, 2006 article in USA Today offered one of the first hints of this as Yahoo Music became one place where an MP3 (which is by definition not DRMed) file for a Norah Jones song as well as one from Relient K became available for sale.

Then, a couple of days ago, Billboard magazine (as republished by Yahoo News) released further hints that DRM is being reconsidered by at least some music publishers, especially under pressure from some large on-line sites, such as Amazon.com and MySpace.

I, for one, would be right there with my money in hand to buy non-DRMed MP3 music files at a reasonable price - like $0.50 each - and I suspect that folks who now knowingly steal music for their collections but have the means to pay for their music would do so to to be legal and support the artists they like.

Lower priced, unrestricted music files, combined with a marketing campaign to make the artists seem a bit more human and approachable would do wonders for the music industry, and perhaps create a revival for digital music at large.

I finally got home to Bonaire a couple nights ago, and among the first things I did was hook up my new HD-DVD drive to my Xbox 360 (which is connected to my Samsung 62” 720p DLP via the VGA/PC cable). Installation was a breeze, although in hindsight I should have connected the USB cable to the back of the Xbox 360 before loading the installation software because as it was, I managed to unplug a couple of things in the back of my Xbox 360 when trying to cable things up during the software installation. I then put the new HD-DVD drive through its paces with “King Kong” in HD-DVD format (included with the drive - also included was an Xbox 360 remote).

I also dug out my regular wide screen version of King Kong for regular DVD playback, put it in my upscaling DVD player, and then sync’d up both the HD and regular titles to the same point in the movie so I could compare current technology (DVD) and new technology (HD DVD).

All I can say is “Wow!”.

I had not realized what I had been putting up with as “good” quality with my regular DVDs until I compared them to the output of HD DVDs. And it’s only going to get better once I get my 1080p HDTV delivered in a few weeks. Last night I watched “16 Blocks” on the HD-DVD drive, and was tickled to be able to read the print on signs, papers, and other props in the movie with great ease because of the image clarity.

Whereas there are all sorts of scaling artifacts in the DVD image, the HD-DVD image is incredibly crisp and a delight to behold. My only complaint, and this is a minor one indeed, is that the HD-DVD drive has no display on it to show me how far along into the movie I happen to be during viewing. I know I can get the Xbox 360 to show this to me on-screen, but it’s visually disruptive.

In any event, now that I have tasted HD-DVD, I will be hard pressed to go back to regular DVD where a choice between the two exists. And as I was one of the unfortunate many unable to procure a Sony PS3 on Friday, I won’t be testing Blu-ray DVDs any time soon, although I suspect the visual difference between Blu-ray and HD DVD to be minimal or non-existant.

One thing I do like about HD-DVD titles I purchased is that most of them seem to include a DVD version as well, so that in locations where I don’t have HD-DVD playback (like my notebook computer when I travel) I can still watch the movie without having to buy a second DVD-only copy (as if I would do that anyhow). And Amazon.com has a deal where if you buy three HD-DVDs you’ll get a 10% discount on all HD-DVDs in 2007. Nice little additional bonus.

Now I need to go buy another HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 in my bedroom… At $199 it’s a pretty good deal, I think.

I give the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

I’ll be posting a few more E3-related items here in the next week, but at present I am on a short vacation in Ft. Lauderdale with my family. The purpose of this vacation is a bit of rest and relaxation, eating, spa-ing, and binging on new and recently released movies. On Bonaire we have only a one screen movie theater and movies shown there are typically 2-4 months old. And the seats are horribly uncomfortable.

So, we look forward to our U.S. trips, where we generally squeeze in as many movies as possible in the comfort of plush reclining stadium seating. It’s not a cheap activity these days, but if you’re a movie-a-holic, it’s well worth it. We’ve only been in Ft. Lauderdale 28 hours, but have already seen three titles: Over The Hedge (6.0 out of 10.0), The Da Vinci Code (6.0 out of 10.0), and M:I3 (7.5 out 10.0) - and all at the Sunrise Cinemas Stadium 15 at Las Olas Riverfront.

And that brings me to the topic of this blog. Each of these visits, for a family of four - two adults, two children - runs $30 for movie tickets (less for a matinee) and then a bunch more for even simple munchies and refreshments.

When we went this evening to catch the 8pm showing of Mission Impossible 3 (MI3) at the Sunrise Cinemas, I asked, as I had the last two times, for two adult and two child tickets. The cashier/ticket seller, a young man named Martin, rang it up. I had already handed him $40 at this point, and was surprised to get only $8 in change, knowing from last night’s movie that I should have gotten $10 back. Turns out he made a mistake and charged me for two student tickets instead of two children’s tickets, and that’s why I got charged $2 more. $2 isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I also don’t think I should have to pay for something I didn’t ask for.

When I asked Martin for the additional $2 back, he politely explained that he had issued me student tickets, and those were a $1 more each. I politely explained in return that I had asked for childrens’ tickets and those were a $1 less. He then informed me that as I had paid and the tickets were issued, he could not correct the matter without there being a shortfall in the cash register attributed to him. As it was at this point a matter of principle, I insisted on getting my $2 back, at which point he gave me a small piece of paper with all sorts of information I would need to fill out (like my name, home address, phone number, etc.) - all to get back money which was the result of a mistake HE made in the first place.

As the movie was about to start I told him to just forget and that I would simply blog the incident. And here we are.

There are two customer service issues here that should be addressed:

1) The Sunrise Cinemas appear to have polices in place which burden the customer in the event of a staff error. That’s a major inconvenience to the customer, who only wants to pay for his or her tickets, maybe buy some refreshments, and then watch their movie.

2) The staff of the Sunrise Cinemas is either not empowered to resolve customer service matters, or not capable of coming up with solutions that would keep the customer happy. Either one is something that could be easily resolved.

These two items are classical flaw in customer service in most any business, and the businesses that have overcome them tend to stand out among their peers. The businesses that succumb to these customer service flaws lose customers.

In my case, we still have at least another three or four movies to catch before we fly home on Sunday. That’s at least another $90-120 in ticket sales alone that I will gladly give to some other movie theater in the Ft. Lauderdale area, even if I have to drive a bit further from my hotel, because I will not give any more business to the Sunrise Cinemas Stadium 15.

The lesson to be learned here is that a couple dollar mistake that is not quickly and easily corrected can cost a business a whole lot more in lost revenues and reputation.

My wife and I are movie-aholics. Our DVD library numbers in the many hundreds, and whenever we get stateside, we typically will park ourselves at a cineplex and watch every movie we haven’t seen yet. This may be partially attributed to the fact that the only movie theatre on Bonaire is a single screen theatre with ever increasingly uncomfortable seats and two 3-4 month old movies showing each night.

So, on our recent vacation to the U.S. we came across the Martis Village Theatre in Truckee, California, showing Eight Below, a Disney movie starring Paul Walker and eight huskies (dogs), among others.

The premise of the movie is that Paul Walker’s character is a professional musher on assignment in Antarctica at an American research center. One thing leads to another, and he ends up having to leave the dogs behind during the Antarctic winter. Faithful to his dogs, he strives for months to find a way back to Antarctica, during which time we are treated to images of the dogs breaking out of their collars and chains, foraging for food, alpha dog jockeying, and more.

And here’s the thing that really, really, bothered me - all the “lost” dog footage, as well as the “dogs are being rescued “ scenes - and we’re talking the midst of the Antarctic winter here - is in bright sunlight!

I can understand some creative license, but folks, it’s dark - just about pitch dark - at the south pole during their winter (which is summer here in the Northern Hemisphere), not bright sunlight all day long!

The sun goes down for the season in March and doesn’t come back until sometime in late September, as I understand it. During the Antarctic summer it’s like a sunny midafternoon up north during our summer, but 24 hours a day.

And, adding to that lack of reality, is that it appears that the International Antarctic Treaty bans non-indigenous animals in the first place. So the dogs would have never been brought there in the first place, and if they had, they would not have been left behind because of the Treaty’s strict requirement that no refuse be left on Antarctica (and yes, dog-sicles would certainly be on the list of banned refuse).

Disney touts that Eight Below was based on a true story. So were James Frey’s “memoirs”.

Eight Below gets a 2.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale (in addition to the aforementioned blatant flaws, it was a pretty poor movie too).

For some insights from a person who has lived at the South Pole, take a look at http://www.spotsylvania.k12.va.us/nspt/question/chrisfaq.htm

I had the Media Center Extender running on my original Xbox some months ago, though not soon enough as it took Sony forever to release an update to bring my VAIO desktop (purchased August 2004) up to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. However, I have pretty much never used it since.

And I suspect it may end up being the same with the Media Center Extender on my Xbox 360.

The reasons for this are simple, but I will point out that they may not apply to everyone.

First, I don’t use my PC for much MCE video recording - I generally don’t record the over the air programs or the ones from the TDS (terrestrial digital service - like DirecTV, but land based instead of satellite) because the quality of the signal isn’t great on either, and because I don’t have any easy way for the MCE PC to switch channels on the marginally better TDS system (none of the remote controller set-up options works for the custom Zenith set-top box).

Second, on the rare occasions I have used my PC for recording programs, they are programs I would rather my children didn’t have access to (think HBO or Showtime programming in the 9pm and later time slots and you’ll get the idea). While I know there are parental controls available on the Xbox 360, they do not appear to apply to the programming I’ve recorded from our local TV signal sources. I don’t need my children asking me why all those people on the shows I recorded, like Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t! on Showtime, or Entourage on HBO, swear all the time. A similar issue applies to my photos - I don’t want non-family using my Xbox 360 to be able to view all the photos on my network storage - nothing embarrassing there, but there are about 15,000 images from the last three or four years, and some are more personal and private than others.

Third, video over the Xbox 360 wireless connection is poor and unsteady. I know they warn you about it, but the five-port Ethernet switch in my entertainment system is full (Xbox, PS2, GameCube, networked Onkyo receiver, and the network connection), and I didn’t want to bother adding another switch.

Fourth, while the music playback system on the Xbox 360 Media Center Extender is nice, once you get it to recognize and catalog music in locations other than the annoyingly default “My Documents” directory, the free remote (the short one) I got with my Xbox 360 has no apparent way to allow me to enter letters into the search fields for the artists or albums or songs I want, meaning that if I want to listen to Paul Simon’s music in my 400+ CD digitized collection, I have to scroll all the way down - a horribly painful and tedious process. Some letter/number keys on the remote would have been a useful touch. I also had the impression that the MCE remote control I got for the Xbox should work (per the configuration settings in the Xbox 360), but no joy there either. And I really have no desire to buy a more functional remote to make up for it.

And finally, I don’t want to have to keep my computer powered on all the time on the off chance I might want to watch a recorded movie or show, or listen to music. I already have a couple of file servers running 24/7 (main one is a Linux box with RAID-0, and the other is a very old PC running bare bones Windows XP for performing back-ups every night), and that’s enough. And I don’t want to have to boot up my PC just to watch some recorded video. Heck, it’s easier for me to just burn it to a DVD and watch it that way.

So, one of the big reasons Microsoft touts for putting an Xbox 360 in the living room “for the whole family to use” just does not fly in my household. It is nice for playing games though.

I love being mindless at the end of the day as much as the next guy, and television or movies are a great way to escape the pressures of daily life, especially as a precursor to sleep. The boob tube slows one’s brain down and gets it away from worrying about reality.

Unfortunately, I find much of prime time TV to be annoying and more mindless than even I can stand. I also don’t like all the incessant commercials - and yes, I understand that the revenue from commercials ultimately supports the production of future episodes of television shows. I also don’t like having to be available at precisely the time the show starts (which becomes even tougher where I live because in the winter when the U.S. is on Standard time, we are an hour ahead - makes for late TV watching - a 10pm EST show is on at 11pm EST here on Bonaire).

You may respond “well, why don’t you just TiVo the shows”?

But that question exhibits a certain ignorance and lack of awareness of the world outside of the U.S.A.

I’m here on the island paradise of Bonaire where there is no zip code to plug into a TiVo box, and a TiVo box can’t dial out to a local number to get the latest program guides for Bonaire (which, face it, is a 110 square mile fly speck surrounded by water, offering a blend of legally and illegally received TV transmissions, by a population of around 12,000).

I have two TV feeds here at my house - cable TV (a hodgepodge of U.S., South American, and Latin America-oriented U.S. originated channels) and TDS - terrestrial digital TV beamed over from neighboring Curacao, offering more of the same. Typically at least one of these is not working. In other words, service and reception are rather unreliable. (A nice way of saying they suck.)

I also have a PC with Windows XP Media Center Edition installed, and I’ve cobbled together a moderately functional program guide for that, but running that system at night requires hundreds of watts of power because without the air conditioner running in the office where the MCE PC is located, it would likely overheat and I would lose my computer to a meltdown.

So, with the exception of our near religious viewing of the latest episodes of Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy (which we watch regularly mostly because it follows Desperate Housewives), we tended to play TV Russian Roulette - watching the least bad show of what happens to be on when we turn on the TV and hoping we don’t die of inanity overload.

But lately, we, like many others no doubt, have recently discovered the joy of TV shows on DVD - whole seasons of such shows in an affordable collection!

Our current favorite is Roswell - a three season show about attractive teenage aliens and their human friends living in Roswell, New Mexico - home of the mystery shrouded and fabled 1947 crash of a weather ballon / space ship. Great characters, decent plot twists, and not too intellectually “deep”. There’s enough romantic interaction to captivate the female half of a couple, and enough alien power display and alien-guys-trying-to-figure-out-women comedic content to satisfy the needs all but the most action movie jaded guy.

We’re about a third of the way into season 2 of “Roswell” now, and vastly enjoying the ability to not even have to fast forward past commercials, and starting and stopping at any time, on any DVD equipped TV system in the house.

With the kids, we’ve started with Star Trek - The Original Series so we can give them a sense of some of the TV origins of things like Star Wars (one of their obsessions at present).

Next on the list to consider buying are Lost - The First Season, and “24” - the Fourth Season (managed to watch most of the other three seasons on live TV, but just couldn’t manage that with the fourth season.

So hurrah for TV series on DVD!

If you’re like me - married, with two pre-teen kids whose hands never seem to be clean enough, and whose abilities to put things away without being asked are utterly lacking - you have undoubtedly seen your CDs or DVDs get damaged or even lost.

Further, if you travel a lot, while it’s nice that most notebook computers now have DVD drives, they suck a noticable amount of extra power if you want to play a movie while in flight and power jacks aren’t available.

For CDs, you can simply back them up by ripping them to your computer - my whole collection of hundreds of CDs is stored digitally on my system at home, and the original CDs are put in my storage room.

With DVDs no such simple option exists, or should I say, existed. That’s because the movie industry decided to encrypt DVDs, and then using its political clout, got the U.S. Congress to pass a bill (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - the DMCA) which made it illegal to circumvent encryption. By doing that they technically robbed consumers of the right to make back-ups.

It didn’t take long for ingenious teenagers to figure out the encryption and break it, for the stated purpose of being able to play DVDs on Linux systems. While the simple code needed to break the CSS decryption spread over the Internet like wildfire, the movie industry and U.S. government worked hard to try and curtial this dissemination of information (and failed, in my opinion).

There are now dozens of programs which let one rip a DVD to one’s hard disk (one of the better ones, as I understand it is DVD Decrypter, but the problem is that the resulting files run 4.5-9GB on average, and even with today’s latest 500GB drives, it makes ripping a whole DVD collection (we have over 300 DVDs in ours here at home) unfeasible.

Enter a program called RatDVD, which will take a non-encrypted DVD image and produce a 1.3GB (on average) .ratDVD file which is the entire DVD movie with all menus and controls. The output quality is surprisingly good, with .ratDVD files playing back in Windows Media Player 10 on Windows-based machine.

It takes a couple of hours to convert a 4.7GB DVD to a .ratDVD file on a moderatly fast PC.

The only drawback I have found is that there appears to be no way to fast forward or rewind a movie.

One added bonus - you can take a RatDVD file and expand it to burn back onto a DVD should you want to have a physical back-up instead of one on your hard disk.

In any event, for a free piece of software it’s pretty good, and it meets a so-far unfulfilled need, namely making back-ups of DVDs in a reasonable amount of space. No doubt the movie industry will not be happy with RatDVD, but since it actually does not circumvent encryption, it’s unlikely they will have much ability to stop RatDVD from proliferating. Plus it can be used for archiving home-made DVDs.

I’ve already started using RatDVD to archive DVDs I have made from my own home videos and slide shows I have made of group vacations for friends. And yes, I am making back-ups of some of the movies I plan to watch during my next set of travels so I don’t have to waste power and face potential damage to my original DVDs in transit.

I give RatDVD an 8.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

Alan Nelson is the person who helped me make sense of blogging during a flight from Bonaire to San Juan, Puerto Rico a few months ago, and thus inspired me to start this blog (thank you Alan!).

Recently, Alan launched the latest of his many blogs - Seat 1A. (As an anecdote, I should mention that when I met Alan, he sat in Seat 1A of our ATR-72 to San Juan, while I sat in 1B - row 1 being the only row with leg room on these small planes.)

In his latest blog entry, Alan succinctly covers the issue of pruning, as suggested by the author of the most excellent book Getting Things Done (a must-read for anyone who has problems getting through his or her to-do list on a regular basis, and in a timely fashion).

Basically, as I understand it, pruning involves taking what one has written and then removing words without destroying the essence of what one needs to convey.

This is something I have tried to work on over the years as I have gotten involved in patent litigation matters - brevity for things like claim constructions is a highly prized skill, and one that causes great agony as the meaning of each word - and every nuance thereof, must be carefully analyzed before being permanently committed to paper. That’s because the other side will then attempt to rip your work apart, and you must be able to defend what you commit to - every nuance of it.

However, as a matter of practice, I pretty much suck at “pruning”. I find it far easier to write 800 words to say something than to use 400 words to say the same thing. The most difficult writing assignment I ever had was for PC Magazine about 15 years ago, when I was asked to describe in detail this very cool (at the time) technology from a company called Edsun Labs, in a 400 word article. That article took me about five times as long to complete than doing the same thing in double the number of words would have taken. And while my editor liked the result, I was not happy with it because I felt it left too much unsaid.

If you’ve seen Milos Forman’s movie Amadeus starring Tom Hulce, you may recall a scene where Mozart presents his latest composition to the King, who after a moment’s contemplation asks the court composer for comment. The response is “too many notes”, and the King, apparently not wanting to appear ignorant, agrees, although the comment is pretty nonsensical. Mozart then asks “Which notes should I take out, your highness?”.

Any reader of my blog might also note that brevity (at least in writing) is not my strong suit. But for that I make no apology. It’s the way I have learned to enjoy writing (this coming from a person who dodged writing-dependent courses in high school and college as if they were poison), and will likely continue to do so in the future.

And thus I may suffer from “too many notes”, but at least I will have said what I wanted to say, with just the right number of words for me.