It is remarkable how delightful it is to watch small children explore the world. Their perspective is fresh, and there’s a marvel in their eyes that is infectious. It is simple behavior, the nuances of discovery that makes an everyday action an adventure: opening a cabinet and discovering the treasures within becomes a noble quest.
When do we lose that sense of marvel and wonder? When does the world become mundane, a cage instead of a playground? To remain an inquisitive soul is a lofty aspiration, and one that most sadly fall short of. Once fallen, can that sense of wonder ever be truly regained? Is it fate to become inured and jaded?
Perhaps we’re not asking the right question. It is, perhaps, unreasonable to assume that a youthful blank slate is the desired state. Instead, can we hope to evolve into one who is perhaps acquainted with the trappings of reality, yet still able to appreciate the beauty of it? I suspect this is closer to the right path, the balance of awareness and innocence that leads towards enlightenment.
A lot of it comes down to seeing the cage of reality, and choosing which side of the bars you perceive yourself on. Are you trapped within reality, or are you an observer of it?
Today’s song was discovered via Chris, who linked me to Drilling P.O.S. REDO by Minus the Bear over at Suicide Squeeze Records. While a good song, it got me curious about the band, so I ended up browsing through the site, and found a song that I ended up liking more: “Dr. L’Ling”, which is from their new album, Planet of Ice, which is due out in mid-August.
“Dr. L’Ling” starts out quiet, with an undulating, droning guitar, then adding a staccato drum, before kicking up to full volume with another, lightly distorted guitar that is vaguely reminiscient of “Creep” by Radiohead’s heavy pre-chorus thrash. The vocals aren’t entirely my cup of tea, but don’t really detract from the overall mood of the song, which mixes a sense of urgency with a vaguely ethereal, “space-y” vibe. (“Space-y” is perhaps a bit hard to describe, but you know it when you hear it, much like ProjeKct Two’s Space Groove.) The guitar work in particular really explores the space of the song, mixing melodic long notes with a rapid, abrupt progression that reminded me heavily of “Discipline” by King Crimson. The song finally winds down with more undulation fading into the distance, which gives the total song a mental image of a space patrol, idling along, called to duty, and then returning to its long quiet patrol.
Overall, it’s an engaging song, and I really don’t mind adding it to my musical library. I’ll look forward to hearing more from this band, and see where their musical evolution takes them in their latest album.
I think it will come as no surprise to most folks familiar with both me and the band that I’m a fan of Modest Mouse. I was initially turned on to them fairly late in their career, with their album Good News for People Who Love Bad News, notably their one-two punch of “World At Large” followed by “Float On,” which when combined, served as a personal mantra and definition through a very trying period in my life. I quickly rounded out my collection of their prior albums, and eagerly anticipated their latest album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. The new album, while not exceeding my preference for Good News…, does not disappoint, with its frenetic, impassioned songs. Needless to say, I was glad to see one of these songs, “Invisible”, show up on KEXP’s Song of the Day Podcast.
“Invisible” starts with a muted drum and guitar build up, which then explodes into a sonic crescendo as the singing starts. Build-up and release seems to be a recurring theme within the song, with several points where the melody builds a sense of urgency before a staccato release of heavy, directed drums and guitar, with a bassline running throughout acting as a glue, bonding the elements together.
In short, the song rocks, and rocks hard. It engages the ear on several levels in a way that could be overwhelming if not prepared for it, combined with a pacing that can’t help but encourage a frenetic mood in the listener. “Invisible” is an excellent example of Modest Mouse’s musical style, and would be a great way to introduce the band musically to a newcomer.
“I’m the life of the party, I’m always smiling. On the surface, I’m as happy as can be.”
You all know the people “Apple Pie” (off The Bastard Fairies’ Memento Mori) is talking about: they seem upbeat and cheerful (much like this song), but the reality is that they’re fairly shallow, and avoid dealing with their emotions, or anything too heavy or serious. It describes an individual who is shallow by choice. The mood and melody of the song encourages this image, with a relatively simple tune running through it, with only the chorus having more complexity and layers: for most of the song, it is simply a synth and lo-fi vocals. With each cycle through the chorus, however, they add more and more instruments, until the final chorus is a diverse cacophany of sounds that works well in a sonic fashion. This ties really well into the metaphor of the song, since you never run into these sorts of people alone.
I like this song, for several reasons. First and foremost, it’s a catchy tune, with a simple rhythm and lyrics that are easy to sing along to — it’s easy to end up nodding your head with the beat or even singing along. In particular when I was first introduced to this song via KEXP, I was dealing with several individuals that I found I was immediately identifying with the song: not bad people, but emotionally shallow, who’d rather sweep things under the rug than address the issues at hand. This gave it enough weight that I ended up tracking down the band online, where I discovered that they were offering their entire album available for download, free (links below). I’d definitely recommend looking them up, and giving the album a few listens, to see if it’s something you might like: especially for the price, it’s worth your time.
The Seattle Monorail at Night Last night, I spent a fair bit of time out and about — simply didn’t feel like going home, for a variety of reasons. I hung out at the coffee shop til they closed, and then took their recommendation on an all night diner, which was delightful, greasy, and good. Jabbered there for a bit, and then I ended up wandering down to downtown Seattle to finally get around to taking some shots for experimenting with High Dynamic Range photography.
For some quick background, let me fill in some details (CS2s “Merge to HDR” doesn’t retain exif data… which makes sense, since it’s a composite of multiple images, so which exif data do you keep?): it’s around 1:45am, on 5th Ave just north of Teatro Zinzanni. For those not aware, Seattle has an elevated monorail system that runs down the middle of 5th Avenue, connecting downtown with Seattle Center, which would be the pylons you’re seeing running down the middle of the street (and providing a handy protection from getting run over while standing in the middle of the street). This particular image is a set of 4 images composited together, each a 1/3 stop apart, with a roughly equal balance between over and under exposed. In hindsight, I wish I’d gone heavier on the under-exposed range, even a full stop apart, and opted for the “proper exposure” to act as my high end. As it was, I ended up dropping a fifth over exposed image from the composite, because I found it too “bright”. I was running at f/22, with an exposure time ranging from 13 to 30 seconds, and using my 17-40mm f/4.
Seattle Monorail at Night with Ghost Nabil The next set is a composite of around 7 images, of which I dropped two. I decided to play a bit with ghosting (go stand in frame for part of a long exposure). It’s also worth noting that this set had a few cars passing through the frame, which left those delightful light trails on the right side of the image. Again, I was running f/22 with the 17-40, and a range of 13 to 30 seconds per exposure. I’m not entirely sure whether I’ll keep the ghosting (I took two shots at the same exposure, one with ghosting, one without, so it’d be easy enough to alter it without affecting the rest of the composition).
It felt really good to be getting out and about with my camera in the night again. I don’t know why I find it so appealing, but I do. Maybe it’s the introvert in me. In either case, it was rolling past 2am, so I opted to pick up and move over to a different location, further into the city. I’ve been wanting to take some pictures of the Seattle Library for a while now, as it’s this awesome conglomeration of odd angles and glass, right in the heart of downtown Seattle. (How they managed to get the city planners to approve it, I dunno, but I’m very glad they did!) Another nice aspect of doing night photography in the city is that parking is a breeze. No traffic, no passersby, plenty of spots to just kinda pull over and fiddle with things or ponder grabbing the camera. In both of these cases, I was able to park no more than 50 feet from where I took the shots.
Night at the Seattle Public Library This first shot is a composite of 6 or so shots, and once again I found myself dropping the higher exposures, ending up with a 4 image composite. Not that you can tell, to be honest — in the case of the Seattle Library shots, frankly I’m not gaining much of anything from the HDR process. The building is already relatively well lit, so I’m not filling detail into shadows or highlights, nor pulling much of anything in the way of a higher saturation of color (even with the heavily orange light of the streetlights). But, I still like the shots, and so I’m sharing them anyway. (This is definitely a picture-heavy post.) Again, f/22, speeds ranging from 15 to 30 seconds, with the 17-40mm. (I should also mention: Canon 5D, running RAW.)
Seattle Public LIbrary, Night, Exterior This second shot is similar to the first, though from a slightly different angle that was apparently enough to alter the metering markedly, to the point that I ended up dropping down to f/16 just so I could avoid using the Bulb function, keeping my max exposure length at 30 seconds. Other than that, it’s largely unchanged… half a dozen shots, once again dropping the higher exposures (something to know for the future for the shots I like to take), taken with the Canon 17-40mm f/4. It’s such a neat building! I’d love to get in there at night sometime, to be able to photograph the interior (also trippy and fun) without pesky people all over the place. Anyone have thoughts on who to talk to about that?
Exterior Geometry of the Seattle Library Alright, this is the last set (I’m calling it a set despite being a single image because it’s a composite, if that makes any sense). I decided to try a different angle, and really ended up enjoying how this came out. It’s notable that you actually can see into the windows of the building across the street better than you could that night (THAT would be a benefit of the hdr merging), and the mishmash of geometry between the grid of the library and the building across the street I just found really pretty appealing. I like how you get a mesh feeling from the reflection of the library in the other building.
Overall, it was a really fun evening, and it felt great to finally get to experiment with something new. I wouldn’t exactly call any of these images exceptional, but I think they came out decently enough. I’m looking forward to heading out in the evenings some more, though given that I start work again next week, I imagine I will be somewhat curbed in my late night escapades (so unfortunate, this “needing money” thing). Days like this that I wish this work was salable, and for good enough money to do it for a living. Going around and taking late night photos of the urban landscape sounds like a pretty awesome career to me!
There has been a lot of discussion within academic circles regarding the use of virtual worlds for the purpose of researching various forms of human and communal interaction and formation. Due to the exorbitant current cost of entry in creating an MMORPG (and the fact that they already have a population for the purposes of sampling), it seems like a great deal of the research is occurring within already established games. There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, though there will come a time when the greater degree of control over variables that comes with creating your own environments will likely become necessary. (As a case in point, while they can select which games they choose to sample, researchers tend not to have control over how the game is marketed, nor which demographics it chooses to target.)
There also seems to be a fair bit of focus on contemporary games, like Second Life, and World of Warcraft. While this certainly has merit, especially in that these games reach a certain critical mass, allowing for a greater demographic sampling for research: you are more likely to get not just core gamers, but also casuals with other interests that play as a fad (because “everyone” plays). This can only help the overall direction of research into social dynamics and interaction, and examining the social organism as a whole. However, what I’ve found is very little attention to a return to prior research, prior virtual worlds and experiments.
I think this is incredibly unfortunate. I think there is still a lot of play left in earlier models, such as MUDs (Multi-User Domains/Dungeons, the text-based precursor to the modern MMORPG). Many MUDs at this point have been established for well over a decade, which I think would offer a wealth of opportunities for seeing how a community matures and shifts as it ages. Let’s take AvatarMUD for example, since I have nearly a decade of experience with it. Over the past decade, I’ve seen the population rise to a peak population count of 190 individual players on at a given time, with a median of roughly 120 across the day, to a slow decline as players moved on, where the median is closer to 60, with a daily peak player count of around 90. Even in this, it has survived better than many MUDs.
As the player community has shrunk, so has the sense of community, which could be partially attributed to several design implementations that allowed for greater fragmentation of the player base (in addition to outside factors, such as a shift away from MUDs in general, and the increased availability of broadband allowing for more visually robust games to be played). What is particularly notable is that as the nature of the game evolved, we started adjusting and adapting more and more for “min-max” players, and hardcore players. This came at the cost of the more casual, social player. While I don’t think it is a perfect ratio, I strongly suspect there is at least a passing corollary between the reduction in population, with the prior percentage of casual and social players. What has remained are largely committed players, who have invested hundreds or even thousands of hours into their characters, and generally have considerably more than one alt. They’ve “mastered” the play mechanics of the game, and generally continue to play because of their investment in the game, and the friends they’ve made within the game, rather than continuing to find new challenges.
Due to making these adjustments in order to “keep ahead” of the “hardcore” players, the barrier of entry for new and more socially-oriented players becomes untenable unless they already have friends within the game. This is not unreasonable, since MUDs are largely populated through word of mouth: they are often labors of love, and not even allowed to charge or generate revenue, which means they tend not to have the budget to advertise. It does, however, mean that the truly new player is largely left to fend for themselves, and can become extremely frustrated until they start establishing a rapport and support group among other players. If they aren’t willing or able to devote the time and energy towards that end, that often marks the end of their time on the MUD.
This isn’t meant to be a doom or gloom forecast of things to come with AvatarMUD, and the staff remains receptive to a number of ideas on how to aid the casual player in becoming established, without sacrificing the game mechanics and design path they’re interested in pursuing. It remains to be seen how effective these ideas will prove to be, but that returns me to the point of this essay: MUDs present an opportunity to observe communities further along in the cycle, and their continued use as a sandbox for virtual worlds should not be underestimated.
While considered bad luck by many, I’ve not really found Friday the 13th to be particularly different from any other given Friday… arguably, I’ve had better luck on them than worse (which I suppose goes with my general experience with “luck”… find a 4 leaf clover, fall and skin your knee… walk under a ladder, find a quarter on the sidewalk. Don’t even get me started on my jade pendant). I slept in today, though not as late as some of the past few days, and overall I’m feeling alright.
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.
Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.
I’m not sure that I entirely agree: while worldbuilding should be by no means the primary function of the story, taking the time to hammer out a core basis for the setting of your story I think can be really rewarding. I must admit that I’m a bit biased in this, in that I like thinking about the esoteric and random elements surrounding a story — how a given civilization functions, the history and struggle that caused that particular world to be formed. It’s easy to become myopic when doing this, absolutely, to start thinking about how a particular tribe in Uganda handles the dry season when your story has nothing to do with that and that knowledge will never even be mentioned. But if you are mindful of this, mindful of the lure of avoiding the story by fleshing out the world (yet another form of procrastination, seductive in its psuedo-productivity), then that elaboration can help tighten and expand your story.
That’s my opinion anyway, and I don’t exactly have any award winning publications to back it up. Unlike M John Harrison.
I kind of agree with him in some ways, though. As soon as the worldbuilding becomes even translucent (let alone opaque), you’ve bored most readers… worldbuilding should be for your own edification and cohesion as the writer. Its role in the story itself should be transparent. (I believe it was Silverberg, and I’m paraphrasing, who commented that Heinlein was one of the few others who managed to ladel on pages of exposition without boring the reader.) I do definitely agree with Mr. Harrison’s thoughts about writing, which he expounds upon here:
The notebook stage is the last time anything of mine sees paper until publication. I like to do lots of operations. Fountain pens and refurbished 1930 Underwood portables don’t cut it; digital management is the appropriate choice. Have you ever noticed how every male novelist you meet at a literary festival wears a linen jacket and is called Tim ? Tim prefers an antique Watermans, maybe his dad owned it. It keeps him pure and returns him to the sinewy prose of the giants who came before us all.
I don’t have any writing pattern. I hate being professional. I don’t write according to a schedule or an output plan; I don’t begin at the beginning and write to the end. Or rather: if I do any of those things I usually have to bin the results. Writing should be fun — absorbing, transporting, intense, whatever. It should ambush you. It should be up there with sex, drugs and irresponsible driving. It shouldn’t have anything to do with research or require a degree in finding out about lipstick colours in 1943. I can’t do it if I’m bored or depressed or feeling unconfident. Once it’s working, I can write anywhere — I’ve done stuff while hanging off an abseil rope on a sea cliff or a highrise building — but not under any conditions. If I’m sitting at my desk I hate to be cold, I hate anyone’s noise except my own. But I like working on a train.
Sounds about right to me. When I’m on a roll, it doesn’t really matter where I am, and if I’m feeling depressed, it’s like pulling teeth to get anything that isn’t simply mopey or angst-ridden out onto the screen or page. I’ve found it easy to get into that rut, and try to be mindful of it, and not letting it overwhelm other things I wish to talk about (if you’ve noticed that my posts sometimes seem varied and veer through topics with remarkable speed, now there’s perhaps a hint as to why… that, or I have the attention span of a goldfish. Maybe a bit of both). With depression, it’s remarkably easy to get stuck on depression and its related trappings, despite the fact that the answer to combatting it is do and be productive and talk about other things.
So, R Stevens linked to SBaGen via Twitter, and I decided to at least find out what the heck he was talking about. Turns out SBaGen is an open source binaural beats generator. If you’re not familiar with the concept, a quick explanation (there are whole books about this, so I definitely recommend looking into it on your own if you’re curious): binaural beats is a method to synchronize and alter your brainwave patterns, ie putting yourself into an alpha or theta (among others) state, for the purposes of meditation, focus, more restful sleep, lucid dreaming, and even (supposedly) out of body experiences. It’s kind of new age-y, but since it’s a free generator, who really cares, it cost you nothing to try it out, and if you decide it’s not worth it, you can delete it easily.
I tried out the Demo, which starts at a 200Hz cycle and slides down to 5Hz over the course of 30 minutes. It’s supposed to theoretically leave you feeling light and energized. I do feel more alert after trying it, though I would like to comment on a few things that happened with it (while I won’t necessarily be posting it on here, I do plan on keeping a journal of my observations as I experiment with this). Notably, a few minutes in, my left thumb abruptly started to feel extremely hot, and my right thumb started to feel cold. Neither was touching anything, and after another few minutes, it largely subsided (which would make sense since different wavelengths are meant to affect you differently, and that frequency changed over that period). Dunno what it all means, but it does leave me curious to find out.
The Wii Loop Machine, found via the new site KiiWii. This is absolutely brilliant, and really highlights just how many new avenues for expression are being opened through rethinking how we control things. I could go on about it, but I think the video really speaks for itself.
I’m currently sitting in the conference room of the Hilton in Dedham, waiting for the Mac OS X Leopard Tech Talk to start (it’s a developer seminar previewing the new stuff coming up in 10.5… they did one for 10.4 as well that I made it to). I’m still pretty pleased that I managed to make it here, as they really are a lot of fun, and I like knowing things, even if I don’t really get a chance to make much use of it. I won’t necessarily be liveblogging the event (some of this is still under NDAs), but I will try to give a general sense of what’s coming up without getting in trouble with Apple’s legal department. It’s really nice sitting here and seeing dozens and dozens of MacBooks, Powerbooks, and MacBook Pros, and logging into the complimentary available wireless network and seeing everyone up via Bonjour. If I were a bit more adventurous, I’d even try IMing people.
[Update: 2 PM They were quite happy to point out that yes, a lot of this is under NDA, and if things are leaked, they don’t get to continue doing these, so please bear in mind that there’s a LOT of information here that I just can’t go into detail about.
My first session was the introduction to the seminar, which covered basic sales numbers, general updates about the application, and then showcased some shiny new features that are definitely pretty exciting. I’m feeling pretty good about what’s changing in printing, and I’d say those of you who are worried about it changing should be well pleased with what’s being done. Core Animation is showing a lot of potential, and a lot of it has already been integrated in ways that you may not really realize: it’s not meant to just be a shiny, a lot of the time animation is a subtle thing to enhance the user experience, to make the UI more clear in what’s happening. An example is the dock, already: if you drag an application icon around on the dock, things move and shift out of the way. It makes it immediately clear where and what’s happening. In 10.5, developers will be able to leverage a lot more of that sort of animation capability for “free”. I’m really excited about some of the new graphics related toolkits that they highlighted.
My second session was an introduction to Xcode 3.0 and Interface Builder 3.0. I’ve got to say, I’m quite impressed with the new features. I like what they’ve done to streamline the workflow, and the new interface builder is sharp, and seems a bit more intuitive. It’s also apparently significantly more extensible than the old version. A lot of the information is available on the developer site, and I’d definitely recommend checking it out if you’re interested in using OS X as a developer platform.
My third session was “Modern OpenGL”, and it was a treasure trove for my particular field of interest — game development. They’re expanding their support of OpenGL, and some of the features they’ve added have already begun to show a marked increase in speed in existing apps: adding multithreading support on the graphics side to a popular game I play gave a 90% frames per second increase. Some of the example apps were crazy impressive in what they were able to pull off, and easily half to two thirds of the presentation covered ways to modernize OpenGL code and optimize it for performance. Some really nice caveats to remember (I have them written down) if I get back into programming.
I’m taking a break at the moment to let my battery charge, but at 3:15, there’s a session on what’s new in Cocoa that I’d really like to attend. Hoping to attend the sessions on Resolution Independence and Printing in Leopard after that, since those are things that are directly relevant to both myself and others I know. Then there’s just the reception and a chance to shmooze with folks before heading back north. Pretty fun day, all told. Kudos to Apple for hosting it!]
Everyone back? Good. As has been raised by several of the more cogent posters, it’s not directly a first amendment issue (which I’m sure regular readers have realized is something of a personal windmill I tilt at), since the Slamdance festival is technically a private organization, and has a right to decide what will or will not be shown at their festival. But there is definitely still some relevance to the battle against censorship and winning over the public mindshare that games are a valid form of creative expression, and deserve the same freedoms afforded to other media towards that end. There is no legal recourse, but that does not mean we should not raise our voices in displeasure at this sort of behavior. As a festival that ostensibly supports the idea of games as art, it is patently unacceptable behavior to remove a valid game from the competition due to a specious claim of moral concern. There is no legal recourse, since it is a private organization, and so the only method of protest that remains to us is to not participate in the festival, to encourage others to withdraw as well, and to express in no uncertain terms exactly why we are doing so. I applaud those developers that have already chosen to make that stand, and hope their other brethren soon follow suit. It is only through community and solidarity that we’ll truly drive home the point that this sort of censorial behavior is not acceptable.
