log

So many months ago my jour­ney to Soup began at Slash­dot, where I was linked to Lasse Gjert­sen’s “Ama­teur”, and in amaze­ment fol­lowed the trail to his oth­er clips and then to the reply videos, one of which was Erlend Viken’s “soup injec­tion”.

Towards the end of Erlend’s vid the music swings into a “prop­er” part of one of his songs, Ambu­lance for Human. I real­ly liked it, so I went to his one-man-band Soup’s Myspace page, hop­ing for oth­er sam­ples. At the time there were three full songs avail­able via a flash music play­er — Pre­lude, My Jus­tine, and Sag­amore — which were all great. (He’s since added the full ver­sion of Ambu­lance for Human).

Hop­ing that Soup’s oth­er web­site would have down­loads, I fol­lowed the link. I glee­ful­ly down­loaded My Jus­tine and Sag­amore, which played while I down­loaded his pre­vi­ous album record­ed under a dif­fer­ent name, Final Concierge — Give it an Empire (link may change, use one above if so).

Give it an Empire’s There’s a City under­neath the Ice part II & III is one of the most beau­ti­ful pieces of music I’ve ever heard, build­ing from a lone­ly, haunt­ing sonar ambi­ence into a del­i­cate chime melody then a sor­row­ful rage against the lon­li­ness. There’s a sub­tle trick with vibra­to fre­quen­cy though­out the melody (par­tic­u­lar­ly not­i­ca­ble around 4:30 into the song) that always freaks me out, since I have a soft spot for the kind of math-influ­enced melodies fea­tured on the Pi sound­track a few years back.

So just over a week ago I gave into temp­ta­tion and ordered Come on Pio­neer, Erlend’s new CD, via Pay­pal on his Myspace page. He’d replied ear­li­er to my email ask­ing about post­ing costs for Aus­tralia, and I was sur­prised that it’d be the same as the US rate.

Yes­ter­day I col­lect­ed my disc from the mail­box and was all excit­ed, even more so when I dis­cov­ered how nice­ly pack­aged it was. I’d heard about half the songs on the album before but now I had a phys­i­cal CD in my hand, with the knowl­edge that the guy who made the music on it had also put the pack­age togeth­er and sent it to me.

The Squash those mis­er­able ants remake on the album is excel­lent. I’ve always appre­ci­at­ed the tech­nique of cut­ting from a dark, haunt­ing tune (Psy­cho) to a hap­py-sound­ing, melod­ic one (Squash), because it makes me care­ful­ly eval­u­ate the lat­ter and in this case I don’t think it’s a hap­py song. :P

Today while I was rifling through things to do, I was lis­ten­ing to Squash. Dis­tract­ed, I thought I’d look up the lyrics. Unfor­tu­nate­ly I did­n’t find any­thing, but I ran over Uhort.no and to my great joy found anoth­er Soup song named Sound­scape of a burn­ing airofloat, about the Hin­den­burg dis­as­ter and con­tain­ing parts of Her­bert Mor­rison’s radio broad­cast of the event. I’d nev­er read about the Hin­den­burg dis­as­ter before and watch­ing the footage over­layed with that broad­cast is god­damned haunting.

Look­ing for­ward to more music from you Erlend. :)

Been a while. A few things have changed.

Last time I wrote I was still work­ing in retail, three days a week. That went out the win­dow on July 31st 2006, rough­ly two weeks after I hand­ed in a short­ened ver­sion of my res­ig­na­tion. Not much fan­fare from any­one about it — sad in a way — but I was hap­py to escape the down­ward spi­ral of Coles.

So I bummed around for a few months, played a lot of WoW, gave job search­ing a go, did some con­tract work through my moth­er-in-law’s busi­ness for Minch­in­bury Den­tal Care, got slight­ly con­cerned about anoth­er down­ward spi­ral, and signed up for a course at Went­worth Falls TAFE.

And so, in cir­cum­stances that I’ve come to smile about while God points and laughs, I’m doing the same course that Michael did when he left The Ware­house about two years ago: Cert IV in Web Design.

Yes, the core stuff of this course is the things I’ve been doing since 1994 in my spare time. And it relies on some skills I got from my last TAFE course in 1995. But, heh, I final­ly have some sol­id work to con­cen­trate on instead of the occa­sion­al con­tract, and I’ve got plen­ty of gaps in my education.

At this stage of the course (three weeks in) I’m still enjoy­ing the struc­tured learn­ing side of it, and to a less­er yet sig­nif­i­cant­ly large extent, the social aspect. And I can say that I’m enjoy­ing using skills I had no real out­let for in the last few years — PHP in par­tic­u­lar. I’m enjoy­ing get­ting back into Javascript, although I still have mem­o­ries of how shaky client-side pro­gram­ming was back in the day.

Which kin­da led to why I’m up at 6:45am again. I’ve been doing the right thing for the last month or two and going to bed before 1am. Today I got up and just read through­out the entire day — blog, arti­cles, ref­er­ences — click­ing through end­less links until final­ly I found some sort of clo­sure by run­ning over things I’d read ear­li­er. It appears that in the last month I’ve missed a few inter­est­ing things hap­pen­ing with our good friends at the W3C.

HTML5/XHTML5. Woot. Big con­grats to the WHATWG on get­ting recog­nised. If only Mozil­la was owned by Ver­i­zon, it’d be a Can­di­date Rec­om­men­da­tion by now…

–

Direct­ly or indi­rect­ly lead by Joe Clark, I end­ed at Maguire vs. Socog, an acces­si­bil­i­ty court case involv­ing Syd­ney’s Olympics Com­mit­tee. Fol­low­ing the link chain I loaded up IBM’s Acces­si­bil­i­ty site, and to put it franky, was fuck­ing horrified.

It actu­al­ly made me angry. In my feed­back I described their site as a self-par­o­dy. Sen­tences like “Walk­ing the Talk”, with a near­by “Learn more” link lead­ing to an all-tables page… and even bet­ter, that page con­tain­ing a sec­tion enti­tled, “Mar­ket­ing: Send­ing the right mes­sage.” The right mes­sage, appar­ent­ly, is to use invalid XHTML Trans and a table layout.

I’ve got­ta get some sleep. Michael’s head­ing over to Ray’s for the whole day and I won’t even be awake to enjoy the com­fort of singing to Fall Out Boy loud­ly and off-key with­out retribution.

BTW, the oth­er boy­band song I liked (note past tense) was N’sync’s ‘Bye bye bye’. Com­plete trash, I know. A friend of mine took to call­ing it ‘Seeya seeya seeya’, which I always thought was great.

For the sec­ond time in 4 years I’ve found a boy band song that I like. I heard this one at work, and on the way home after­wards I was jok­ing with Michael that I’d found a new pop trash song to com­pete with his Bey­on­cé; remix­es and mid-80’s remakes. It’s actu­al­ly much worse than that: It’s Incom­plete by the Back­street Boys.

Michael detests it.

I did­n’t pick the boy­band con­nec­tion; there’s one vocal line, repeat use of the word ‘baby’ is at a min­i­mum, and it’s got a rock­’ish back­ing track instead of pop syn­the­siz­er effects.

Appar­ent­ly the band’s re-formed (reformed?) after they broke up a while back (they broke up? News to me. I don’t pay much atten­tion to bands. The last break-up I was wor­ried about involved Evanes­cence). Now I feel trapped between not sup­port­ing man­u­fac­tured music and the fact that it’s actu­al­ly quite a good song, even with a few iffy lyrics.

Me lik­ing this song is an excep­tion to the rule that includes Nick­el­back­’s Far Away and Fig­ured you out even though the rest of Nick­el­back­’s songs sound iden­ti­cal. I feel like a hyp­ocrite after singing

this is how you remind me
of all your oth­er songs

so many times in the car, but am I still a hyp­ocrite if they make a unique-sound­ing song and I like it? I acknowl­edge that Nick­el­back­’s singer has a great voice. I just doubt­ed the band’s abil­i­ty to escape the same four tones. It’s a pity that Far Away had to be more pop than rock to do it, though. I’d like to hear an acoustic ver­sion that’s more rock, in a dark­er tone like A Per­fect Cir­cle’s live Philadel­phia per­for­mance of 3 Libras.

‘Incom­plete’ has its prob­lems, but it’s the lyrics in this case. The open­ing line

emp­ty spaces
fill me up with holes

made me laugh when I first read the lyrics. But in the same breath I can say that I like

But I am swim­ming
in an ocean all alone

for some vague, unde­fined reason.

The track still exploits a lot of pop tech­niques that I find mar­gin­al­ly abhor­rent. I have a hob­by in col­lect­ing these kinds of things. My favourite is the “raise-octave” tech­nique, used post-sec­ond-cho­rus, usu­al­ly about two-thirds through a song. It involves mov­ing the entire track (includ­ing vocal) up one octave, to make it sound fresh and emo­tion­al­ly ampli­fied even though you’ve been hear­ing the same cho­rus for two min­utes already, like a debater yelling his pre­vi­ous argument.

Although the author of Against Pop ram­bles on seem­ing­ly for­ev­er, I agree with most of the state­ments there­in. Music is ter­ri­bly sim­pli­fied in our main­stream cul­ture. Although it may not be an exam­ple that the author would con­sid­er, it’s what defines for me the dif­fer­ence between Tool’s Third Eye as music and Evanes­cence’s Bring me to life as a song. There’s a whole lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion miss­ing in the lat­ter. Some­thing like Black Eyed Peas’ My humps I would clas­si­fy as the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor, a track. It uses voice and some kind of instrument.

Maybe the biggest dif­fer­ence between music and songs is the emo­tion­al con­nec­tion. A good peice of music takes the lis­ten­er through a series of emo­tion­al highs and lows, where­as songs tend to take aim at a tar­get long before we hit the cho­rus. Peo­ple cry at clas­si­cal music for its com­po­si­tion­al beau­ty, the way it car­ries them from one emo­tion­al land­scape to the next. Those who cry to Bon Jovie or Sha­nia Twain do so because they ampli­fy one emo­tion — usu­al­ly loss, love, heartache, need. That’s a pret­ty mon­strous simplification.

But on the upside of this, some­times peo­ple don’t feel like invest­ing their entire soul. Some­times I don’t want to be affect­ed, just have some­thing to sing along to. You have to cater to those peo­ple dri­ving to the beach on a sun­ny day. Clas­si­cal music isn’t “fun” in that sense. Not every­one wants to be on the emo­tion­al roller­coast­er all the time. Tech­no is a great exam­ple of that. On the whole, it’s the gross­est sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of bass and excit­ing heart­beat mod­i­fi­ca­tion. Top-of-the-field remix­ers like DJ Tiesto attempt to build a big­ger pic­ture from pop, but it’s not gran­u­lar enough to match some­thing com­posed from scratch.

I have to run — I’ve got a meet­ing at 3pm.

Cry­tek’s new engine looks amaz­ing. And what bet­ter vehi­cle for it than yet anoth­er first-per­son shoot­er. I hope it’s a bet­ter game than Far Cry, which had every­one rat­ing it 9.5/10 pure­ly because of the jun­gle and water graphics.

Sin Episodes proves that you can take a great engine and make some­thing mediocre look­ing out of it. I remem­ber play­ing the demo a long time ago and feel­ing mild­ly humoured by the graph­i­cal style. This time they’ve tak­en Source, changed the char­ac­ter mod­els and mod­i­fied the weapon­ry. For all intents and pur­pos­es, this game oth­er­wise looks like Half Life 2, giv­en a goofy makeover and big­ger breasts. And mur­locs.

The Rev­o­lu­tion specs were appar­ent­ly leaked yes­ter­day or some­such, and now there’s peo­ple tak­ing sides on whether it’ll be worth get­ting. It’s the only con­sole I’d con­sid­er pick­ing up out of this gen­er­a­tion because Nin­ten­do will endeav­our to make unique expe­ri­ences, and his­to­ry is doomed to repeat itself with PS2 and XBOX, espe­cial­ly the for­mer. The aim of those two is to out­stage each oth­er in mar­ket­ing, not mak­ing inno­v­a­tive games. The only thing that real­ly changed this round was the abil­i­ty to ren­der more poly­gons and pix­el shad­ing; your abil­i­ty to make enjoy­able, dif­fer­ent games is not increased by ren­der­ing or CPU pow­er. We reached the nec­es­sary mem­o­ry and stor­age cap with the last gen­er­a­tion. All you’ve done is pro­vide devel­op­ers with the abil­i­ty to make more geek porn, wast­ing years of devel­op­ment on mak­ing ren­der­ing engines.

Gen­tle­men, it’s time for anoth­er video game crash.

I am in no way say­ing that I don’t like games look­ing good, but we’ve got an unhealthy focus on screen­shots, and thanks to broad­band, game trail­ers. Some­where we have to remem­ber that you can’t play screen­shots. The core game log­ic that runs most titles these days would be lucky to be ten per­cent of the code­base, and prob­a­bly even less than that of the total devel­op­ment time. There are more artists mak­ing high-res tex­tures and UV map­ping than pro­gram­mers writ­ing core game logic.

I loved Half Life 2, but reduce the core game idea down to basic prin­ci­ples and you end up with:

• use vari­ety of guns to shoot ene­mies that block your way.
• occa­sion­al­ly solve puz­zles, some involv­ing physics, that block your way.
• get to the next load point, repeat till end credits.

Inte­grat­ed physics make Half Life 2 stand out, sim­ply because it plays such a part in the game. Con­sid­er the role of the grav­i­ty gun though; what was the first thing you did with it? You shot some­thing with it, essen­tial­ly mak­ing it a anoth­er gun, albeit with toi­lets as ammo. (Con­sid­er how lit­tle gran­u­lar­i­ty the grav­i­ty gun gave you in inter­act­ing with objects. I know this aspect can be improved — move­ment of the gun inde­pen­dant of the play­er’s view­port would have enabled using objects as shields a lot more — but even­tu­al­ly, your inter­ac­tion is still lim­it­ed by your input device.) So you’ve got this great thing that fires ran­dom objects. But does it change any­thing at all, game mechan­ic wise? No.

Read­ers pay­ing atten­tion may be shout­ing, “but it’s the sto­ry­line, the atmos­phere, the char­ac­ter inter­ac­tion that made the game”.

The sto­ry­line deserves to be applaud­ed. It’s great. Very movie-qual­i­ty. Hold on, we’re not play­ing a movie. When did you make any char­ac­ter-defin­ing choice what­so­ev­er in the game? I’m not talk­ing “oh, I’ll walk in through the east gate instead of the north” kin­da choic­es. When did you decide you’d had enough of Alyx, leave her to the smil­ing Com­bine sol­diers, and join Dr Breen for tea and crum­pets and world domination?

Video games have sel­dom stepped out­side lin­ear­i­ty. The very idea of true emer­gent game­play could quite under­stand­ably scare a game devel­op­er to death. It means either a nigh-infi­nite amount of stor­age and art resources or a way to gen­er­ate con­tent on the fly, which could mean a loos­er grip — or even let­ting go — of the the­mat­ic reins. And pre­dictably there’s some oppo­si­tion amongst play­ers who don’t like to have oppres­sive­ly huge choic­es. Tycho from Pen­ny Arcade makes a point about his light case of RPG OCD in the recent game Obliv­ion, and it’s true — God, I’ve stood around in World of War­craft try­ing to decide what to drop. I still haven’t made my mind up as to what leather­work­ing branch to take yet.

I’ve become so accus­tomed to not mak­ing deci­sions in games that when it comes to one, I’m kind of lost. When I’ve cho­sen a path in RPGs it’s because I’ve thrown cau­tion to the wind and gone with what sounds good. The inabil­i­ty to decide is caused by curios­i­ty and the regrets of con­se­quence — what’s going to hap­pen on the path I don’t choose? Will it be some­thing cool­er? Will I miss out on something?

But if you give the play­er enough choic­es, you lib­er­ate them from regret and they start look­ing for­ward instead of back. Their path becomes unique and full of promise. The chal­lenges they face will always have a cor­re­spond­ing ‘moti­va­tion to over­come’ because the play­er has formed their own goal. Choic­es become fun: now you’re doing what you enjoy instead of expe­ri­enc­ing script­ed events.

Back on top­ic. This start­ed as a mono­logue about Rev­o­lu­tion and the lack of inno­va­tion in big-brand gam­ing and some­how turned into a plea for a free-reign game.

I’m all for the new con­troller and the focus on new ways to inter­act with games. At first I thought “God, how will I play Street Fight­er on that?”. And then I realised that if I want­ed to play Street Fight­er, I’ve already got a PC, a Dream­cast, a Sat­urn, a Megadrive, and a stack of emu­la­tors. What use is anoth­er iden­ti­cal Street Fight­er game? Same goes for first per­son shoot­ers; I’ve played through 50 of them. Not many of them were unique enough to war­rant a day’s play.

When the Nin­ten­do DS trail­ers came out, there was a demo of a Kir­by plat­former that blew me away. Kir­by stood on a hang­ing log bridge, and the play­er pulled the mid­dle log down­ward using the sty­lus, and let go. Kir­by went sail­ing up into the air. I rewound the video. Wow. It’s like Kir­by is a phys­i­cal object that he’s inter­act­ing with. That’s some­thing I’ve nev­er felt before.

I don’t think any­one knew it exist­ed, but I used to have a site called Eldalambë.com. Rough­ly trans­lat­ed it means “Elvish lan­guage”. Pre­dictably, it was a site built to host LOTR and Quenya-relat­ed teng­war writ­ings, although after the site was fin­ished I only ever made two post­ings on it. I liked the design sim­ply because I did­n’t have a clue what I was doing with absolute positioning.

Nev­er­the­less, I’ve put the con­tents back online: Eldalam­bë. You will need Teng­war fonts. There’s a link for them giv­en at the bot­tom of that page. Please also note the descrip­tion of Inter­net Explor­er as a POS. This has not changed since, and will not change with the release of IE7.

I’ll fix that hor­ren­dous exam­ple of code bug­gery soon.

—- 

Anoth­er quick tan­gen­tial thought from my ear­li­er post about dis­trib­u­tors lying about their movies: Code 46. What fol­lows is a gen­er­al warn­ing. I watched the trail­er for this over a year ago and lunged at the shelf when I saw it on DVD. I wish I had­n’t. Any­one wish­ing to see this film should watch the trail­er imme­di­ate­ly after­ward for pos­si­bly the biggest con­trivance ever. Fast-paced sci­ence-fic­tion thriller, my arse. When Michael starts tak­ing pot­shots at char­ac­ters dur­ing the film you know it’s not good. This movie’s trail­er was a com­plete lie.

PS. Do not watch Straight Jack­et, ever. If it means a per­ma­nent loss of func­tion, so be it.

‘Night.