| time travel |
Posted 2008-03-25 23:25:20 by
Jim Crawford
I watched The Mist last night. It was pretty amazing. There was one shot in particular that really dropped my jaw. It totally made the movie for me; for all I know, maybe the rest of it was merely okay. If you've seen it, I'm curious if you know the shot I'm talking about.
I'm pretty sure the rest was good too, though. It seems like Lord of the Flies recast as an 80s-style monster movie, with a Lovecraftian fear of the utterly alien thrown in. I'm really into that sort of thing, about how we become totally different people during unusual and stressful situations. It also seemed like a parable about how extreme faith and extreme rationality are both doomed, and the correct path is in usually the middle, but I'm not positive that that still holds true when you're not a character in a Stephen King novel.
Harmonix patched Rock Band a few days ago.. . .
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| the future |
Posted 2008-03-01 21:11:26 by
Jim Crawford
Charles Stross's recent blog post about an article in The Economist has me talking people's ears off about the technological Singularity again. This is, in part, because it provides me with another angle from which to approach the topic, for people who didn't understand the augmented and/or artificial intelligence approach. Viz:
Extrapolate the curve Stross describes. The current problem of the SF writer, that it's now hard to write plausible fiction set more than 15 years in the future, will soon be the problem of the venture capitalist, who will be unable to be able to effectively plan one year into the future. And soon after that, it will affect people trying to plan their day-to-day lives. Progress will just be happening too quickly.
People I've spoken to have argued that thinking about the Singularity as a tipping point doesn't really make sense, because it's been getting continuously harder to make good predictions about the future. In the past I didn't really have an answer for them, but I'd now argue that having difficulty making good plans for the weekend due to the rate of technological progress is a difference in kind.
Of course, what makes that scenario implausible is that like most things exhibiting exponential growth, human progress is limited; in this case, limited by the very cognitive ability we're using as a measuring stick -- how can you make improvements on something you don't comprehend? You probably wouldn't even be able to define “improvement.” I suppose that's where the augmented and/or artificial intelligence necessarily comes in. And that's where the caveat about the Singularity possibly not being particularly utopian comes in.
Those aren't really topics I feel like I can do justice right now, but here's some light reading on the subject if you're interested. Life is only the prologue to intelligence!
| Me: | “I'm going to go shopping. Frikkin' basic human needs. There'll be none of that shit after my consciousness is transferred over to Computronium.” |
| Danny: | “I'm counting the days.” |
| Me: | “Over 10,000 so far. If I hit 15,000 and I'm still flesh and blood, I'll be really disappointed.” |
| Danny: | “Yeah really.” |
| knytt stories |
Posted 2008-02-28 19:31:37 by
Jim Crawford
Knytt Stories, by Nifflas, is clearly inspired by Seiklus. This is evident in the minimal and minimally-hazardous world design, and the focus on exploring sparsely beautiful environments rather than overcoming obstacles. It works really well; Knytt Stories is one of the most beautiful works of art I've experienced, with wonderfully evocative visuals and gorgeous ambient music that, paradoxically, you notice, due to the world design being paced to allow the mood to soak in.
But one thing Nifflas doesn't get about Seiklus, or chooses not to duplicate, is the lack of text. Seiklus took a cue from Ico here, and possibly Another World. Ico seems to have stumbled on that aspect of the aesthetic accidentally, since some versions of Ico provide subtitles for the made-up language the characters speak -- though just now, I see that Fumito Ueda cites Another World as one of his inspirations for Ico. That's interesting.
Nifflas, unfortunately, bookends his games with heavy-handed, poorly-written stories about saving the world, seeming not to realize that they'd be much stronger without text, or even without any context at all. The game flow and visuals and music provide a complete narrative experience already.
I wish the writing were better, not just because I like good writing, but so I could say whether even a well-written story could have the austere, childlike beauty that Seiklus and Ico have, and that Knytt Stories would have if you closed your eyes while clicking through the opening and closing cut-scenes. But I think that language is, itself, too sophisticated.
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| nutrition |
Posted 2008-02-23 12:29:16 by
Jim Crawford
According to this nutritional chart, large grasshoppers are less nutritious than small grasshoppers by weight. The square-cube law would indicate that as the grasshoppers get larger, a greater proportion of their mass would be structural, so I'm guessing chitin isn't so nutritious.
Yeah, according to the Wikipedia page on chitin, it's a carbohydrate similar to keratin, which composes hair, horns, hooves, &c. So the insect fragments you find in consumer chocolate don't provide much extra nutrition after all. I've been living a lie!
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| drums |
Posted 2008-02-19 01:43:57 by
Jim Crawford
I bought a DTXPress III electronic drum kit on the 13th. The same day, I ordered a kick pedal to go with it, which hasn't arrived yet -- frankly, I probably should've just gone to interact with the staff at the Guitar Center a few blocks away -- but I put my Rock Band kick pedal in its place and have been playing for a couple hours a day. Even without the kick actually making any noise, drumming is a whole lot of fun.
I can play some pretty compelling stuff now, within certain genres and tempos, but I don't think I actually have much actual limb independence yet. What I do have is a bunch of copypasta limb patterns I can move around the kit. For instance, I could bust out some sweet triplet-based fills, but there's no way I could keep time during them -- or, I should say, I can't express time. Since I do know where in the beat I am. Or maybe I just know when I get it wrong. Hm.
For another instance, when keeping time in eighth notes with my right hand on the hihat or ride, I have sort of a muscle memory that knows where to place snare hits, but if I'm playing quarter notes with my right hand, I would be hard pressed to place the snare hits at the same point in the measure.
I imagine it'll all come with practice.
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| no more heroes |
Posted 2008-02-05 20:49:06 by
Jim Crawford
No More Heroes experience is something of a two-faced, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde experience. One face is a fast-paced, incredibly ornate brawler festooned with references to anime and gaming culture. The game part is never actually that fun, but it's relentlessly entertaining.
The other face is ... a satire of Grand Theft Auto's design mindset, maybe. . . .
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| rock band vocals |
Posted 2008-01-18 02:23:01 by
Jim Crawford
Five-starred everything on the Rock Band vocal career. Still can't pass Green Grass and High Tides on guitar. So the verdict is in: I'm a much better real-life singer than plastic guitarist.
Update on how I'm doing compared to the rest of the world: now that the game's been out a few months there's some actual competition, so my easy #13 has turned into a hard-won #39. You can probably see me here. If not, try paging down! Paging up will probably be futile; I'm more restricted by my free time rather than my abilities at this point, and am intending to go back and make a concerted effort to gold-star everything I can, but I doubt I'll be able to crack the top 20.
Interestingly, the songs that I had the most trouble five-starring, the ones I had to practice the most to reach the five-star score cutoff, are also mostly the ones I'm doing best at on the individual song leaderboards. Which pretty much means that Gimme Shelter, Mississippi Queen and Blood Doll are not just the hardest songs for me, they're the hardest songs for everyone.
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| images on youtube |
Posted 2008-01-03 20:02:35 by
Jim Crawford
If you view the page source for a Youtube video, for instance the Smush “music video” for Starsitter, you'll find that nearly every img element on the page links to the same transparent single-pixel GIF. So what's the deal?
Here's an example:
<img src="/img/pixel.gif" alt="" class="arrowRight" height="16" width="16">
By itself, this creates a 16x16 square of empty space. The trickery is in the style definition for arrowRight:
background: transparent url(/img/master.gif) no-repeat scroll -423px -20px;
Take a look at master.gif. They're setting that mother of an image as the background image of the 16x16 space, and aligning it such that the only 16x16 pixels showing are the ones showing an arrow pointing right.
I imagine the reason they're doing this is to cut down on the bandwidth and time overhead the browser usually incurs by retrieving each image in a separate HTTP request. Another advantage is that putting all the images in the same GIF allows the compression algorithm to find redundancies across all the images.
For the record, disadvantages include: the additional bandwidth and time overhead incurred by the lengthier code required to refer to each image, breaking the site for browsers that don't support CSS or don't support it properly, and the ongoing cost of implementing and maintaining a more complex solution.
Only the last disadvantage is even a little compelling in this instance, and I'd imagine it's easily offset by the coder morale boost of working with such a neat trick.
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| voting methods |
Posted 2007-12-17 17:30:02 by
Jim Crawford
In the Condorcet Ranked-Pairs election system, every voter ranks the candidates in order of preference. Then, the system compares every candidate to every other candidate and determines whom the electorate, overall, prefers. Putting your favorite candidate at the top of the list means you prefer him to all other candidates, and putting your least-favorite at the bottom of your list means you prefer any other candidate to him.
One problem with this system is that, unlike the Plurality and Instant Runoff systems, every voter must rank every eligible candidate or the system may have unexpected results. For example, if one voter puts Mr. Potato Head at the top of his list, and everybody else leaves Mr. Potato Head off their lists, the system considers Mr. Potato Head to be an excellent candidate, since everybody who expressed an opinion likes him best, and nobody dislikes him at all.
In the United States, every natural-born citizen over the age of 35 is eligible for the presidency, so to institute the Condorcet method in our presidential elections would require adding some hacks. One possible hack is adding an “everybody else” token that people can insert in their list. This allows the voter a level of expressiveness not currently available, giving them the ability to, for instance, submit a ballot that reads: - Everybody else
- Incumbent
As Danny pointed out, however, there might be problems when “everybody else” wins the election. I say this is when we just call democracy a failure, pack our bags and head home.
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| rock band |
Posted 2007-11-30 00:50:53 by
Jim Crawford
I played Rock Band a lot over Thanksgiving, mostly solo. What excited me most about it was that it essentially teaches you to play drums. You're going to be missing out on a lot of technique, like rolls and, uh, dynamics, but one of the hardest parts of drumming on a kit, hand and foot independence, is all there in the game. With the Pavlovian reward system of a well-designed game, I've made a lot of progress really quickly here, which is exactly what I was hoping for.
I'm also at #13 on the vocal career score leaderboards. I wish I knew how many people I was singing better than, but I can't find the interface, if it exists, to seek to the end of the list. For reference, though, there are about 60000 people on the drumming leaderboards. Thing is, I'm really not that good a performer; I'm just really good at remembering and matching pitches, with no emotion whatsoever. A lot like Liz Enthusiasm of Freezepop.
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