| RIP CRT |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|08:56 pm] |
When I moved to Toronto I took a computer monitor with me, and it was an CRT that I'd already had for a few years already. This was this was the monitor I used when I applied to grad school and the monitor I used when starting Dinosaur Comics.
This monitor had served me well, but the past year or so it was clearly dying. The display would get fuzzy, and then snap back. Now I use three monitors and this was on the screen I used mainly for status stuff, so it was okay. I could still read the text when I needed to!
It was getting old though, and this morning I actually thought I was watching it finally die: the screen slowly faded to black, over the course of about 30 seconds, like a movie would fade to black over a particularly dramatic coda. These were my thoughts as I watched my windows fade away. Even the little green power light on the front of the monitor faded with everything else. My old monitor faded to black I watched it die. Goodbye, faithful hardware!
BUT THEN it faded back! You guys, it faded back just as it had faded out. It was a death-bed deke, and I was totally taken in. The monitor did this cycle a few more times, but I was wise to it now. I wasn't going to be taken in again. Eventually the monitor stopped fading out entirely, and we both got back to what we were working on before.
That was this morning. Just now, it faded to black and hasn't recovered. The power light has died with the screen too, but its switch is still in the "on" position. Okay, so just now I turned the power off and on again and the monitor recovered perfectly fine. MAN I GOT DEKED AGAIN.
Okay, so clearly this monitor is sick but doesn't want to die; it wants a peek at its obituary before it goes. Well here you go, monitor, I've moved this window over to you and I'm writing this on you and this is your obituary. If you do anything awesome after I post this I'll update it appropriately, but I think this is where our two paths diverge. You have been a good and faithful monitor and I will probably not forgot many of the things I saw through you.
You were a good monitor! |
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| jenn's longboard has a Story To Tell |
[Jun. 1st, 2009|09:04 am] |
As Wikipedia will tell you, I am a longboarding enthusiast[citation needed], and this weekend when my sweetie Jenn and I went to Kingston to visit my parents, we brought our longboards. Mine has a picture of a T-Rex skateboarding on it! My brother painted for me and it is TOTALLY AWESOME. Jenn likes horses so Victor painted a horse skateboarding on hers, last year, when we both got her the board for her birthday.
Jenn is new to the sport, so she's still learning! We went down to the waterfront trail so she could learn how to brake and corner in a place where there wouldn't be much traffic. UNFORTUNATELY, Kingston's waterfront trail is really spotty, and ended in a vehicular road in a few places with just a sign saying "MORE TRAIL THIS WAY AT SOME UNDETERMINED POINT DOWN THE ROAD". But we found this nice 5m wide cement pier down by the water and it was perfect. Smooth, safe and dramatic. Here's a shot of Jenn!
Jenn almost lost her board in the water once, but not really - it wasn't in any real danger of going in. She asked me what we'd do if the board went in, and I said that the water probably wasn't that deep, but in any case I would instantly strip down, hop in, and pull the board back out. This is an example of "fore shadowing". A few minutes later, Jenn was working on her inside turns, when she bailed backwards, which, as you may know, is a bad sort of bail in this situation because as you fall, you kick the board out from under you. The board went speeding to the edge of the pier and straight into Lake Ontario. I ran over as fast as I could and saw the board sinking slowly, and true to my word stripped off my clothes and hopped in the lake to fetch it back.
What I had failed to realize were two things: one, that the waves crashing against the pier were high enough to splash over, and two, that the water was barely above freezing. I jumped in and instantly felt like I couldn't breathe: the cold was so shocking. I surfaced without touching bottom, and the board was gone. In retrospect it was pretty dangerous, and Jenn joked that if I'd died, she would have just thrown my board after me and driven back to Toronto alone, washing her hands of the entire matter.
This was very sad, as the board was now underwater, and we could see that the water was way deeper than we'd thought. We were quite a distance out from shore, and the shore we were on was built up anyway - the natural shore was further away still. The board was lost.
We consoled ourselves as best we could and went to Queen's campus where I insisted Jenn keep learning on my board. Here is a shot of us on campus looking sad:
Later that night we called Victor and told him that his artwork was at the bottom of Lake Ontario, snatched by Poseidon's watery hand. HE DIDN'T THINK IT WAS THAT FUNNY, even when I said on the next board he could draw a horse wearing a snorkel. It was a sad evening. The board was gone.
I don't have a picture here, but you have to imagine a shot of the board resting silently at the bottom of the lake, barely lit by a few silent moonbeams. Maybe a fish swims up slowly, pauses, and then speeds away.
The next day was brighter. My dad said that due to zebra mussels, there was very little plant life in the lake, and you could sometimes see to its bottom from that very pier. But even if we could see the board, the water was pretty deep there - beyond the range of most casual diving, he said. Plus, the water was way too cold to jump in anyway. It was time to take a box and then think outside of it!!
After we did that, we drove back to the pier with a shovel in the back seat: an extendible shovel that my dad bought to pull snow down off the roof. It had a range of 20 feet, and in tests with my board, I could hook its lip over a wheel and pull up a board. At the pier, however, we found that the water was actually 20 feet deep straight down, so I could only touch bottom by hanging over the edge, and couldn't maneuver the shovel at all. Worse, I found that I needed at least a 20 degree angle to get the lip of the shovel under a wheel: when going straight down, I couldn't do anything. The only good news was that, if we looked hard enough, we could just barely see the white highlights of the horse's mane at the bottom of the lake. That was good! The board hadn't been swept away. It was time to think outside of an even bigger box!!
It seemed to me that if we had a giant, heavy hook and could see the board, then I could probably get the hook under the trucks of the board and pull it up by its wheel. Jenn suggested that one hook would turn its hooky side away when being pulled through the water, but if we could get a grappling hook, we'd be set. Maybe an anchor? The local boat store had nothing useful, surprisingly, and the hardware store didn't sell grappling hooks even though we asked nicely. The biggest hooks they did sell were meant to be used to hang bikes from your roof - and they seemed like they actually might work. We bought three! To weigh the hooks down, we bought some 40 degree plumbing joints - the heaviest metal we could get for only $1.25 each, and put one at the top of each hook. Duct tape was used to tape the hooks together and keep them in a grappling hook formation, and neon orange rope to pull the hook back up.
We assembled the grappling hook in the parking lot, then we drove back to the pier.
I'm really excited by how awesome our grappling hook is. It is SERIOUS BUSINESS.
When we got there, the wind had picked up - as we later found out, the wind was actually at 35 km/h (that's a lot!) and was gusting to 65. 5 foot waves were soaking the pier, and me, as I stood on its edge and dropped the hook into the deep. Even so, I felt the board a few times, and once even hooked it! But it detached itself as I pulled it up - the water was just moving too much. Also it was freezing. Jenn left her camera in the car so there's no pictures of this, but if you ever saw the movie "A Perfect Storm" that was basically how it went down.
We drove home and checked the weather, and saw that the wind was to die down in the evening. We were supposed leave for Toronto at 3 pm, but you don't just abandon a board when you're this close. We could extend our trip, leaving just before sunset to get to the pier when the wind was more quiet but there was still light. Our plan was, if we failed tonight, we'd return to the house, sleep for a bit, and drive out at 4 am to try again when the water would hopefully be entirely still: this would leave us enough time to drive back into the city and get Jenn into work Monday morning. With our ACTION PLAN in place, I used some free time to take apart one of those dumb LED fiber optic toys and used it to upgrade the hook to the BOARDFIND MARK II: now with lights shining down! We would be able to see what the hook was seeing. Here's a shot of the upgrade, again facilitated with duct tape and also zip-lock bags, sealed with duct tape:
For Hallowe'en this year I may go as the BOARDFIND MARK II.
Sunset began and we said our goodbyes to my parents, hoping that we wouldn't be back tonight. The waves had calmed some but was still blowing. When we got there, we found that with the sun almost set, the light wasn't enough that we could see the board. We'd have to do it blind. I dropped the hook where I remembered the board being and trolled it back and forth a bit: unfortunately the mounted light wasn't much use below six feet, as it was just too dark. Suddenly, I felt the hook catch on the lip of the board. I pulled it up, but no dice. I figured I'd caught the side, and needed the wheel. So, I dropped it in again, found the board, and this time pulled towards me for a bit before pulling up. It felt like I had something. I pulled up the rope and yes - soon the board's pink wheels were coming into view! We cheered and Jenn hauled her board up on dry land. It was none the worse for wear after its day and a bit in the briny deep. We cheered and hugged and an elderly couple walking by ignored us. Then we posed for VICTORY PHOTOGRAPHS!
Here's a shot of how much rope was used to reach the bottom, which also doubles as a good band photo:
We drove back to Toronto with the board and felt like we were pretty great. When we got home, we took one more shot: the BOARDFIND MARK II in the dark, which faithfully recreates what the skateboard itself and any sea monsters would have seen just before rescue.
Totally awesome!
Anyway that was my weekend! |
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| the calorie! NOW YOU KNOW |
[May. 27th, 2009|07:29 am] |
I got a bunch of emails about the calorie yesterday! It is a ridiculous system of measurement and I did my best with it in the comic, but here's the deal. Unlike every other system of measurement ever, the word "calorie" refers both to itself and a unit of measurement 1000 times greater (or smaller, depending on your point of view)! It's like this: "calorie" can refer to the amount of energy needed to heat one giant kilogram of water by one degree celsius OR it can also refer to the amount of energy needed to raise one tiny gram of water by one degree celsius. Plus, there's the term "kilocalorie", but as Wikipedia's calorie page notes, the term "kilocalorie" and "calorie" are interchangable when dealing with food energy.
Nice.
This is compounded by the fact that some (but not all) people use a capital-C "Calorie" to refer to the kilocal, while others don't. On food labels in Canada, capital-C "Calories" are listed, but so are capital-F "Fat" and capital-S "Sodium", where it has no special meaning, so that's not really much help.
In the comic, I went with lower-case "calories", as having everyone capitalize it every time looked weird, especially in panel 2. Most people wouldn't notice anything wrong, and for those that did, I had Utahraptor clearly define his terms in panel 5, so that folks would know what we were talking about. Unfortunately, unless you have just spent a few hours researching the calorie, it's easy to get confused and think that the numbers are 1000 times too big - or too small.
It gets worse! It turns out that the amount of energy needed to increase the temperature of water depends on the initial temperature of the water you're dealing with. There's the 4 degree calorie, the 15 degree calorie, the 20 degree calorie, the "1/100th of the energy required to move water from 0 degrees to 100 degrees" calorie, the "this is the amount of joules we've just decided upon and that's THAT" calorie, and so on. All are around the same amount, but of course, there are times where you want specifics.
In conclusion, the calorie is dumb and we should all deal in joules which are precise and which map to every form of calorie anyway. Besides, replacing "I'm counting my calories" with "I'm judging my joules" sounds way more like something we should be saying in the year 2009! You know it's true
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| Star Trek V - TOS Edit |
[Apr. 14th, 2009|12:33 pm] |
A few years ago I watched a version of Star Trek V in which someone had edited it as if it was a TOS episode. They cut it down to 60 minutes, removed a lot of the stupid stuff, added in 60s era titles and effects, and basically made what I thought was a pretty good TOS episode out of the worst TOS movie!
I have been searching online and can't find any links to this movie anymore, or even really any references to it. Has anyone else seen this? Can you help a brother out? |
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| on the newspaper comics page |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|04:15 pm] |
At the Titans of Small Town show last weekend, I was chatting with some of the people there and someone (I've forgotten your name - sorry!) asked me about newspapers and comics and I had a revelation I'd never had before, which is as follows:
The death of newspapers is going to be great for comics, you guys!
And here's how I defend that:
When you say "comics" to people, they'll think of what they're familiar with. And if you say "comics" to most people in North America - and here "most people" unfortunately means "people who have never stepped inside a comics shop" - what they'll be familiar with will probably be three things: superheroes, Archie, and newspaper strips.
Superheroes are pretty easy to avoid if you don't read them: they're sold in comic shops, and the only time they intrude out of that is on amusement park rides and when movies come out. Archie you'll see in the checkout at grocery stores, but I don't see many adults (besides myself) flipping through them while waiting in line, and I don't think they sell much beyond the under 12 set. I think it's fair to say that newspaper strips are the only comics the average adult in North America has a chance to read every day. They're in the same paper that the news comes in! That's CONVENIENCE.
And what sucks is that most comics appearing in newspapers are BLAND. Terribly, similarly, depressingly bland.
There are exceptions! There are some great newspaper strips, I am pretty sure. And while it could be that newspaper syndicates offer a huge array of really good comics to papers, what the editors of every mainstream newspaper have overwhelmingly chosen, in every city I've ever lived in, traveled to, or otherwise read the papers of are the safe ones, the standbys: Garfield. Hi and Lois. Blondie. Hagar the Horrible. Beetle Bailey. Born Loser. Frank and Earnest. The Wizard of Id. I say "mainstream" newspapers because I've never seen an alt weekly running "Beetle Bailey" unless they're being particularly ironic. Look, The Onion's print edition thought it would be funnier to run Cathy in Spanish than it would be to run it in English, the language that the rest of the paper is printed in.
I'm referring to these comics as "bland" because they're all telling the same sorts of jokes, jokes that have long become predictable. I'm not saying they're terrible, because they're obviously appealing to an audience - and judging by the interchangeability of their humour and their comedic aesthetic, it seems like they're all appealing to the SAME audience.
That's where the problem is! The comics being printed in most newspaper comics pages don't appeal to the majority of people. Obviously one comic is never going to appeal to everyone, but there's so little variety in most comic pages that it reduces down to presenting only one sort of comic, only one sort of comedy, day after day. There's a variety of reasons (safety, momentum, the syndicates themselves) that these comics, the safe ones, are the comics that most people are exposed to, day after day. Can you really fault the public for deciding that maybe comics just aren't that good? For confusing the medium with the only examples they've seen of it? After years of reading the comics page and finding only one good comic - or worse, of reading the comics page and finding nothing but a sea of depressing comics that follow the formal structure of a joke, but are so wholly and unambiguously unfunny, they defy classification as "humor" - can you blame them for finally concluding, "Wow, maybe comics just aren't for me."?
And with newspapers (in their current format) struggling, so too is their comics page. It'll either die slowly or it'll morph into something different, and either way it'll be an improvement. It's going to be great, you guys! In 15 years, when young people hear the word "comics", they're not going to think "Garfield". Nobody but Garfield fans will think that! The rest of us will either be thinking of a comic that WE enjoy, or we'll never have actually read a comic and have fewer negative preconceptions about the form.
I want to be clear: this is not dissing newspaper comics, beyond those that I named, I suppose. I'm not saying all newspaper comics are terrible: in fact, I'm certain there's actually MORE terrible comics online than there are in print. And I'm not dissing print as a medium either - whether print or web comics, we're both doing comics, guys. What I am dissing, what I'm prematurely celebrating the death of, is the standard newspaper comics page: that ambassador which, for whatever reason, ended up privileging blandness over interest, sameness over change, safety over risks. That ambassador which once reached into the homes of most everyone in North America, introducing comics to a whole generation with a depressing, bland handshake that went on for 80 years. That ambassador which started out great, but which ended by giving a whole generation the smallest idea of what comics can be - of what comics ARE, right now.
This isn't a problem online because there is no syndicate there deciding which comics to price at which rate and no newspaper editors deciding for you what to read today. There's just comics - most of them free. If you find one you like, odds are the author is also linking to his or her favourites too, which is a great starting point for assembling your own reading list. There's tons of great work out there - you just need to go exploring.
The good newspaper comics will still be just as good when you're reading them online. |
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| pontypool |
[Mar. 13th, 2009|12:58 am] |
Guys I just saw Pontypool with some dear friends and it was really fantastic. Highly recommended! It's a zombie film, except the infection is spread by language. Really interesting, and if you can buy it as a premise it's fantastic.
It's set at a radio station, and at the beginning it's all people reacting to what they're hearing. It's shot so well that it totally captures your attention, even though most of what you're watching is just people's faces as they talk and listen. Joey tells me it was adapted from a radio play (adapted from the book by the same author) and it stands on those strengths very well.
Go see this movie is what I'm saying! |
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| dear twitter people, please stop it with the new tw words, for the love of twod. |
[Feb. 25th, 2009|05:06 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | A plus D - Crazy (Nelly Furtado vs Gnarls Barkley) | ] |
Jenn mentioned last night that the only thing that seems to get me really grumpy is language. She is right! I am generally a really easy-going guy, but I can rattle off reasons why I don't like the word "blog" and never will, dagnabbit. And with Twitter, there's a whole new set of words that bother me not JUST because they're new and unfamiliar and therefore to be hated and feared, but also because they're weird corporate verbs. Like "twittering" - as in, using Twitter. It's a word that applies only to one corporation. We don't talk about Garfielding when reading Garfield comics or Coking when drinking delicious Coca-Cola carbonated beverages. Why do we need to invent new words for Twitter?
I mention Twitter because it's already got more than just one verb. Posts are "tweets": a noun, which is fine, because corporations are going to make up new things all the time. But then people talk about "tweeting" and now we're in verb land, where the act of "posting" on Twitter is so radically different than the act of posting on any other website in the whole world that it's got its very own action word. And this is where I get grumpy!
So to help convince me that this is TOTALLY FINE and that I should roll over and accept it, please help me come up with corporate verbs that are already in use: words used to describe action involving the product of a single company.
Here's my list off the top of my head. I thought genericized trademarks would be a good place to start, because there you've got nouns that have gained traction in everyday language.
- twittering
- tweeting
- googling (I'd never say it, but I've heard it plenty of times - mostly in relation to non-Google searching, which I know Google hates because they're trying to protect their trademark from genericization)
- escalate (which surprised me! I thought it had a different origin, but it's a back-formation from escalator, which used to be a brand name)
- photoshopping
- xeroxing (again, something I'd never say, but something I'm familiar with)
- sea-dooing (arguable, I've heard it, but upon doing so I've never checked the brands of the "sit down personal watercraft" being used)
- sellotaping? (which I've NEVER heard, but which the generic trademark list I linked to says is used as a verb)
- "don't tase me bro"
- velcro (I think I've heard "velcro them together"... MAYBE??)
- PayPal ("PayPal me the money")
(The only ones on this list that I'd actually use as verbs without thinking "This word belongs to a company" are "escalate", "velcro", and "tase".)
So guys, what am I forgetting? |
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| DID IT HAPPEN OR WAS IT HEADY FANTASY?? |
[Feb. 17th, 2009|02:42 pm] |
A few days ago I am ALMOST CERTAIN I read an article about ratings for websites, and the proper way to calculate your top lists with them: "highest rated items", things like that. They're tricky, because when you show something like "Top 10 things", these lists tend to be static. That's why most websites have an "in the past 7 days" rider, the article said, to shake things up, because once something enters that list it tends to stay. And you want to rate an item with ten 5 star ratings and one 1 star rating higher than something with ten 3 1/2 star ratings. Right?
The article also specifically mentioned Amazon.com and another site as doing this sort of thing wrong, and showed examples from their sites. The trick was the way you'd expect to do it (the naive way) has some hidden flaws. The article then gave a better way of doing it involving some complicated math and some simple code. It was in a trendy language. Ruby? Python?
Anyway I'm pretty sure I skimmed the article, but I can't find it. And I had a dream where my friend Pat and I were looking for the article, but all we found was a hand-written version of it (?) and it was missing some pages. When I woke up I wasn't sure if the article had ever existed in the first place, or if I had dreamed it! I'm pretty sure I skimmed it and THEN dreamed about it, but any memory I have of skimming a random website is so flimsy that it may have been part of the dream too.
So if you came across this article please let me know! I have not been confused as to whether something happened or I dreamed it in at least a decade, and I wish it was over something way cooler than a website showing you a better way to generate a list on a computer.
UPDATE: Here it is! gregstoll shares my dreams. |
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| dudes |
[Feb. 12th, 2009|08:14 am] |
Dudes I feel kinda odd about my last post! I meant it as a "Hey, here's the article I was writing about!" but I think it came across as "Hey, here's that dude from before! I MUST END HIM."
I did write an article pointing out the critical mistakes I saw in his article, but I think there's a difference between that and, you know, actually seeking him out to point these flaws. I know it's different, but I kinda feel like I posted a link to his Facebook page. Or like, his boss's website. That's what it's like. If it was an article Matthew had written on his blog, I'd be fine - but since it's The Walrus, and they presumably paid money and have a relationship with Matthew that he relies on for food, maybe that's not so cool!
Anyway in summary and in conclusion, CANADIAN GUILT, WOOOOOOO |
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| using statistics and not looking like a jerk. |
[Feb. 2nd, 2009|09:30 am] |
There's a particular kind of lazy writing that grates me every time I read it, and it's when people who don't know or care what they're doing try to use statistics. The latest issue of The Walrus (generally a pretty good magazine!) has a story by Matthew Hays ("To NFB or Not to NFB") about the National Film Board, or NFB. The NFB puts out tons of great Canadian short films. Here's what Matthew wrote:
I recently conducted an entirely non-scientific survey, which confirmed my impression that not only do many (if not most) Canadians not get the NFB; they're not even sure what it is. At one of Montreal's busiest downtown intersections, the corner of Peel and Ste. Catherine, I stopped ten passersby to ask them two simple questions: what is the NFB, and can you name an NFB film? Five drew a blank; one guessed that the NFB was a financial institution; four correctly identified the NFB, but only three could name an NFB film. A small sampling, certainly, but the results are telling.
No, they're not, because your sample size is insanely small. If he had asked 10 of my friends, I'm sure 10 of them would know what the NFB is and 8 of them could name films. "But that's not fair," you might be thinking, "Your friends are probably into art and thus aren't a fair example." Exactly! A sample size of 10 isn't enough to draw conclusions from.
This was a really egregious example because Matthew presupposes our objections and tries to address them by saying how it's a small sampling and non-scientific, but science isn't there sitting beside statistics just because there were no other empty seats on the bus. You can't wave it away and draw conclusions anyway and try to get the authority of an actual survey from your half-assed "man on the street" segment, like Matthew is trying to do here.
Look at these:
"I asked 10 people on a street corner about the NFB and four knew what it was"
"I asked 100 people on a street corner about the NFB and forty knew what it was"
"I asked 10,000 people on street corners throughout Canada about the NFB and 4,000 knew what it was"
"I asked half of all Canadians across many different socio-economic groups about the NFB and 40% knew what it was"
"I asked every Canadian except one about the NFB and 40% knew what it was"
At some point when reading that list you probably began to think that the examples are ridiculous. Of course if you ask all Canadians except one, you'll get a result you can use! And there's clearly a spectrum between that and "Um, I asked some people?" where you can draw reasonable conclusions. That's called "statistical significance", and it's why real surveys say things like "The results of this survey are considered 90% accurate, 19 times out of 20." You can measure how representative your sample size is, and from that, how much weight your numbers carry.
You don't need the math to know that Matthew's numbers are not representative. All they tell us is what 10 people, who happened to walk by the corner of Peel and Ste. Catherine in Montreal while willing to talk to an author, thought about the NFB. We can't conclude any more than that because Matthew didn't do the work required of an actual survey. It's kind of fun because it lets me say things like "The numbers Matthew Hays comes up with in 'To NFB or Not to NFB' are PROVABLY WORTHLESS, and therefore so too are the conclusions he draws from them." The power of Science, ladies and gentlemen!
So why did Matthew include this paragraph at all? Well, it fills up the page - especially if you add disclaimers, which, if taken seriously, amount to "Guys what I'm about to say should be disregarded, so why don't we all just skip to the next paragraph break". More importantly, people seem to see statistics and think they carry weight. Matthew shamelessly appeals to that when he says that, despite admitting the fact his survey is non-scientific, "The results are telling". They're really not, except they tell us what he thinks of statistics, and his audience, I suppose.
I've been in arguments before where someone has talked to 10 people out of a huge and diverse set and tries to draw conclusions from that (just as Matthew did) and when you point out that he's only spoken to a vanishingly small proportion of the group and that this is not at all significant, the person says "Look, I'm not being scientific, I'm just drawing conclusions from what I saw". And this brings us back to "well if you'd spoken to me the results would be different" example above, which underscores how ridiculous and fragile these conclusions are.
In other news, earlier in the piece Matthew misused "beg the question" so I may be wrong in trying to get him to be more precise in his writing! |
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| Anyone who wants to produce this play as a three-person show should please feel free. |
[Jan. 30th, 2009|02:10 pm] |
The past little while I've been playing with a game called Façade. It's free, and I recommend it! It came out years ago though so this may be OLD NEWS to you.
I came across it in a discussion on adding more emotions to games and making NPCs have more depth. It's pretty interesting! In the game you show up to a party of two old friends, and they're squabbling with each other. You can type whatever you want (text adventure style!) and you've can walk around and interact with the people and the environment some with the mouse. PRETTY STANDARD SO FAR, RIGHT?
What's interesting is that the whole game is exploring and managing the relationships between the two hosts, and between each of them and yourself. That's where the focus is. Looking at the code of the game WordNet is used to figure out what words are related to sense groupings, which helps, and which shows the effort that's gone into understanding your conversation. There's bugs in the game, of course and the parser isn't foolproof, but it's good enough to be immersive and to feel like you're having an effect on things, even if you're not ALWAYS listened too. What makes the game work well is that there's no preset conversational options (so you feel like you have a lot of freedom) and when you finish, you can see your entire run as a screenplay, which works surprisingly well and can also be hilarious.
The first time I played it, I played it like a game, running into the house, exploring the room as much as possible, and then kissing the wife over and over so that she'd leave her husband for me. The husband, Trip, got angrier and angrier until he kicked me out. GAME OVER. Okay, so these people respond like real people. The next time I played it I tried to behave like a human being. I only kissed Grace ONCE. I was understanding and I tried to keep everyone calm. It didn't work too well, but I did keep things together long enough for Grace to admit she'd cheated on her husband, and then she left and the husband was left stunned, and the game faded to black. GAME OVER.
I figured I knew their problem now, and could take a shortcut to success. Here's how my run after than one went, screenplay style! The dialogue at the beginning I overheard while outside their apartment:
RYAN SOLVES THE RELATIONSHIP ISSUES OF THE PEOPLE INSIDE HIS COMPUTER: THE PLAY
GRACE
Trip, when are you going to get rid of this?
TRIP
What, Grace... this?
GRACE
Yes, you know how I feel about it --
TRIP
I know I know I'll do it right now, alright?!
GRACE
You know I've had to ask you about this several --
TRIP
Get off my back! I'll get rid of it in just a minute!
RYAN
hello?
GRACE
Fine, Trip... fine...
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
TRIP
Oh, he's here!
GRACE
What?! You said he's coming an hour from now!
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
TRIP
No, he's right on time!
GRACE
Trip...!
(Trip opens the front door.)
TRIP
Ryan!!
RYAN
you guys should get a divorce
TRIP
Hey! God it's been so long since we've seen you! -- (interrupted)
(Trip closes the front door.)
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
(RYAN knocks on the front door.)
(RYAN knocks on the front door.) |
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| every once in a while I link to this |
[Jan. 16th, 2009|09:31 am] |
And this time because I discovered that Jenn and Katy hadn't seen it!
The Empire That Was Russia : colour photographs reconstructed from black and white originals (3 photos, taken with a red, green, and blue filter, respectively) taken by Prokudin-Gorskii before the invention of colour film.
In his day, he'd project these three images using a triple projector with the filters installed, one image on top of the other. You'd probably get some sembalance of colour, but it wouldn't be precise and would be pretty blurry. The Library of Congress digitally put them together and cleaned them up, and the results are stunning:
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| Mr. Tusks sent me a letter! |
[Jan. 15th, 2009|12:25 pm] |
So guys a little while ago I got a mysterious package in the mail! It was addressed to T-Rex and it was from MR. TUSKS, with his official vice-mayoral address and everything! Apparently T-Rex has been giving out my address. This was really exciting, so I tore the package open. Inside was a magnifying glass and a still-smaller package, sealed with wax!
This package was semi-transparent, and I could see a still-smaller letter inside. Mr. Tusks had actually sent a letter all the way from Tiny Towne Island! I was suspicious when I saw the return address because THEY CAN BE FAKED, but it was TRUE. I opened this smaller package in haste, but not before stopping to examine the seal. It said, "World's Smallest Letter" and I was inclined to believe it! At this moment I was inclined to believe anything, because fictional characters I'd created were sending me letters.
Inside was Mr. Tusks' actual letter (encased in transparent plastic to protect it during shipping and to make it easy to find in the comparably voluminous envelope, I'd imagine). So tiny! It was hard to read so I used the included magnifying glass.
I opened the sheath, and there I was, holding Mr. Tusks' letter in my enormous hand, a hand that appears so large in this photograph that you could wrap yourself up in it at night like a warm blanket. The tiny latter was also sealed with a tiny bit of wax - the official wax of the vice-mayor's office, I imagine! It was exciting to be receiving letters from people in positions of such esteem.
What did I find inside? A letter! But it was extremely tiny, so I shot this through the magnifying glass supplied:
Hah hah! Oh, Mr. Tusks! You're always getting involved in some SMALL piece of mischief!
ps T-Rex I am sorry I opened your mail but not that sorry
pps: also in the package was a little card from The World's Smallest Postal Service, which is exactly what it sounds like. Mr. Tusks clearly found a good go-between for the Tiny Towne Island Postal Service and the Canadian one!
ppps: thank you to whoever it was put these events in motion! It made my day. |
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| I saw Caddyshack for the first time yesterday |
[Jan. 15th, 2009|09:18 am] |
| [ | music |
| | lemon jelly - his majesty king raam | ] |
It was - pretty okay? Really weird. Rambling and wild in places, very structured and conservative in others. Here is what I learnt from Caddyshack!
- Rodney Dangerfield can get the best lines of a movie. The movie ends where he walks up out of nowhere and announces to the entire cast, "Hey everybody! We're all going to get laid!" and they all cheer and the movie ends. There is no context for this line, or for everyone cheering, and that's why it works. Everyone was talking about other stuff before he showed up.
Actually that's pretty much all I learnt. This movie has raised my respect meter for Dangerfield by 10%. HOW IRONIC?? |
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| on calling 911 |
[Jan. 11th, 2009|10:18 am] |
So last night I was driving home after a night of FUN TIMES, about 1:15 am, and it was snowing really badly. It's been my observation that when driving in Toronto, everybody sucks but me, so I was taking sidestreets instead of the main roads, reasoning that the chance of getting stuck was less than the chance of someone rearending me because they didn't leave enough braking distance.
Just north of Bloor on Euclid, there's a parking lot on the left hand side, and as I drove by I saw it was empty except for an SUV on fire. And not a little fire - the whole hood was ablaze, flames were going up about 15 feet into the sky, and it was parked next to a wooden fence, next to a house, and if the fence itself wasn't on fire yet it would be soon.
It was crazy! My first instinct was to DRIVE BY. It was a moment of "That's insane. That's crazy. Someone else must already be on this". It was only a second, but now I can totally understand that idea of nobody doing anything when they hear something. There's an instict when you see something that's crazy, that's unexpected and bad, that it's so crazy and so unexpected that someone else must be on it. It's not your job to fix reality. I'm taking longer to articulate it than the feeling itself lasted - it was only a moment but it was a very real feeling.
Anyway, I stopped the car and backed up (to double-check the name of the street) while calling 911. After I told them what I was seeing in a calm, professional manner they told me someone else had just called it in as well, and that fire trucks were on their way. Good!
But then I felt weird about leaving it, so I pulled off to the side and waited in my car. For a few moments it was just me in my silent car, looking out my window and watching this bonfire in the snow. I stayed in my car because while leaving the fire to burn seemed wrong - even though there was nothing I could do - but I also felt weird about standing around watching someone's car on fire. Staying in the car was somehow a compromise.
Soon another car pulled up in front of me and stopped - blocking the road - and got out of their car to watch, so I got out too. Again, now somehow it's less ridiculous to be standing around than to be the only one in your car. There were two explosions - one seemed like it was maybe a BBQ on the other side of the fence, and the other came from the SUV. The firetrucks arrived about 2 minutes later: by this time the flames were up really high and there were about 10 rubberneckers like myself. They turned the fire into a huge cloud of steam, the police showed up, and then I went home after someone helped push me back on the road, where I had become stuck! There was nobody inside the SUV, which was relieving.
I had recently watched a Mythbusters where they contrasted "Hollywood-style" car explosions with "REAL" car explosions (the first is pyrotechnics, the latter reduces the car to twisted metal) and I can tell you that Mythbusters is BUSTED. This real car explosion was very Hollywood-style: huge flames, and then explosions that made the fire bigger. When the fire was steam, as the firemen poked around with flashlights, you could see the structure of the car was intact. |
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