not with a bang but a rattle

January 20th, 2009

I bought this Dell in 2000 and it’s been remarkably reliable–my only complaint is that the A: drive never worked, but I had the computer for a full year before I needed it and found that it didn’t. Even that I could understand, since there was a strong clue why: I just turned the computer off, lifted the A: drive’s flap with a butterknife, and used a pair of tweezers to pull out several long flat sheets of dust.

So I needed the drive once and didn’t need it again, and the computer remained a workhorse even after my darkest days when I was so stressed out and depressed that I’d sleep till afternoon, spend the evenings thinking about killing myself, and stay awake overnight playing Starcraft in order to stop thinking about killing myself. Throughout this entire time I was bitter and vicious, losing friends right and left, and would become shockingly violent at the first thing that went wrong.

I can’t remember what trivial thing it was that set me off (except that it was just after the death of a relative I didn’t even know very well) but one day I kicked the tower, rocking it back into the wall and gouging the sheetrock. The tower settled back down with the beige plastic busted and the metal frame behind it bent into roughly the shape of the front of a size 13 shoe. Even after that the drives all worked (except for the A: drive, which had never worked) and I never had any problems with the computer that I didn’t cause myself (occasionally through temper but–surprisingly–more often through various proofs of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing).

I’ve stuck with this Dell, though, partly to prevent myself from getting hooked on newer games (whether that’s likely or not, this computer won’t play them) and partly to remind myself that things are going rather well now, that I’ve made a number of improvements, and that chances are very good that the worst part of my life is over.

I’ve intended to ride this computer till, as Bob Dylan says, the wheels fall off and burn. So it’s with some alarm that I turned it on tonight and was met with a sound much like a cell phone rattling across a table. This sound settled into a much slower clunky rattling, and finally calmed into the more typical “jet flyby” of the fans that I’ve become accustomed to over the last few years. Perhaps the wheels will fall off and burn sooner than I thought. I was looking forward to using the computer for another five years or so.

Death Note

December 22nd, 2008

I’ve just begun reading Death Note and like it but have, less than halfway through the first volume, just got that sinking feeling that I know how it ends. Cnegvphynel, V org gung Y genpxf qbja Yvtug naq gung Yvtug qvrf, gung Elhx hfrq gb or uhzna, naq gung Yvtug nsgre uvf qrngu orpbzrf n Fuvavtnzv.

I’m hoping that, as with M.T. Anderson’s Feed, I’m incredibly wrong.

Still, I’m enjoying the book so far. Maybe Ohba will surprise me.

Global Swarming

November 28th, 2008

It’s very crude (and short), but here‘s the game I’ve been writing as a way of learning Actionscript.  Kongregate.com wrote up some tutorials on how to make Flash games, and then held a contest for games entered based on the tutorials, so that was as good a hook as any to get started learning.

I spent about 11 hours on the game today, programming new features, fixing things and breaking other things, and got super tired of it.

I’ll probably continue working on it in a few days, adding the final boss, more enemies, tweaking the difficulty ramp, etc.

Fantastic Contraption

September 24th, 2008

As an undergraduate and right afterwards I was irresponsible with video games, often playing them all night when I should be sleeping, blinking and looking around in the early morning, bleary-eyed and dazed as if all of the world outside of the computer were something new and alien.  On these occasions I’d usually  order pizza and call it a night, but it didn’t stop me from the occasional realization that something was seriously wrong: that my eyes were solid red from iris to eyelid, that I had an intense headache, that I’d been hungry for five or six hours but that it hadn’t been enough to prompt me to get up and find something to eat.

The games were mostly built towards a specific end, with a handful of goals laid out and specific techniques left to discover.  Then once you knew that on the “survive 30 minutes” map you’d need three or four turrets and at least two barracks constantly training marines, the map held little challenge or even fun.  That was the problem with most of the games: there were finite discoveries trailed along a very few pathways where victory was possible.  The games were not much like life, which is generally brimming with possibilities (though many of them unrealized); instead they all worked as a Socratic method in service of a dull and often non-transferable lesson.

It was partly the realization that I was giving myself the equivalent of a hangover without having been drinking, and partly the realization that the games were fundamentally flawed, that led to my quitting games for a few years.  I uninstalled all of the games from my PC and deliberately did not upgrade it so that I couldn’t play the newest ones.  And somewhere along the way they’ve mostly lost their lustre.

The distance has been useful: I’ve rediscovered my love of reading and of music, I’ve adopted and completed various projects, I’ve learned CSS, PHP, and MySQL.

Lately I’ve begun playing games again, but in moderation and only for free.  One of the games that I’ve found lately that I like a lot is Fantastic Contraption. It’s a crude physics engine with about two dozen levels and a very simple goal: get the dark pink object (often a ball, sometimes a square or rectangle) into the area marked “goal.”

There are only five possible building elements but any number of ways to reach the goal, and one of the brilliant touches of the game is that the creator lets players save their solutions for others to browse.  So one person might bulldoze a wall between the start location and the goal, whereas another might build a slingshot and launch the ball over it.

Some of the contraptions built are crude and ungainly, some are elegant and clever, some are unlikely and hilarious, many give that odd frisson of discovery.

For all the game’s attractions it’s worth saying that the physics on show are far from perfect–the game doesn’t handle tensile strength realistically, nor does it take friction into account nearly enough (especially in regards to large objects rolling up a hill).  Still I’m willing to accept those both shortcomings as authorial choice: the graphics are cartoony and stylized, implying that suspension of disbelief should be a given.

Still, it’s my new favorite game. Taking a break from web work, I solved level 19 with a Rube Goldberg machine, and here’s how someone else solved it much more simply.

font weekend

September 7th, 2008

I used the Proctor Zeus font yesterday to make some signs at work.  In so doing I found that at larger sizes some of the characters show small angles where I’d meant for them to have nothing but curves.

Now I’m going through the fonts glyph by glyph, finessing the letters and digits.

It’s dull work, though valuable, so I’ve also started a second entirely different font that I’ve had in mind for awhile.

Proctor Zeus

September 2nd, 2008

Font is done, coyly described as “in the style of a popular children’s book author” or somesuch.

It took about 60 hours total, though most of that was due to inefficiency: these were the first four fonts I’d made and so I was unfamiliar with both the process and the software. Also, though it’s a decorative font, I decided to go ahead and make the regular font, “italics,” “bold,” and “bold italics.” (The scare quotes are on those because the other fonts are really just different drawings of the same characters: a hack to allow an easy way to swap one B for another that’s slightly different, etc.)

They’re Unicode fonts, but they don’t have the full 1674 glyphs: I thought I’d have to know both Yiddish and Hebrew to stylize those characters without risking morphing them into something they’re not, so I just left them alone. I also didn’t add the Romanian characters, but if there should ever be a need for them I’d be willing to go back and add them.

The fonts all validate, for whatever that’s worth: no off-curve extreme coordinates, no contours with incorrect direction, no intersecting coordinates.

They look very good in Photoshop, not so good in MS Word.  But they print from Word with much finer detail than they’re shown with on screen.

The Proctor Zeus fonts are available here.

update: I had a redirect in the .htaccess file wrong earlier; it’s fixed now and font downloads work as they should.

a fount of tedium

August 29th, 2008

Work continues on the font.  At this point I’ve spent about 40 hours on it over the last few weeks, from inking to scanning to cleaning up the letters, to importing the glyphs to removing extraneous points and curves to validating and testing.

I’m done with the regular and italics, halfway through the bold, not yet started on the bold italics, and thoroughly tired of the work.

Reviews

August 29th, 2008

Years ago, shortly after Crash came out (the one about racism in L.A., not the one based on the bad pun on auto-eroticism), I wrote a piece about the film.  It was a strongly felt criticism of the film as absurd, crass, predictable, and manipulative; and while I was pleased with my writing at the time I realized later that it had some serious failings.  The most serious of the failings was that the review was as much about my reaction to the film as it was about the film itself.

Recently I fell into nearly the same trap in reviewing the graphic novel The Walking Dead on my library’s internal forum: I judged it predictable and overwrought, glossing over important ethical concerns while pretending to take them seriously.  The criticisms engaged with the text more than in the piece on Crash , but I still judged the work against my expectations rather than against what we can determine about the author’s.

I don’t want to get into the ‘death of the author’ debate, though it’s certainly worth acknowledging that the author’s intentions aren’t always clear, even to him- or herself.  What I do want is to give authors a fair shake.

I’m not a fan of the Pauline Kael approach to criticism, where the writer is as forceful a presence (and sometimes more forceful a presence) as the subject.  But apparently I’ve been writing with that same approach without realizing it.

It’s retrospectively obvious that everything said says something not just about the subject but also about the person who says it.  If you’ve read much of their work you’ve probably noticed Leonard Maltin’s aversion to violence, Roger Ebert’s occasional free pass to derivative storylines in films on uncommon subjects.

In both of those cases I accept the author’s personality as part of the review, but what I want for the things posted here is to determine as much as possible what the work is trying to do and to judge the work against those intentions.  I’m puzzling over how those reviews are best written, not at all sure if or when I’ll find out.

Hurm

August 20th, 2008

Today while I was at work someone stole the seat off my bike: old, worn, hard, uncomfortable, coming apart.

I’m not sure if it was desperate need, mischief, or harassment, but I hope the thief finds the seat as uncomfortable as I did.

King: a Comic Book Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

August 3rd, 2008

King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

King: A Comic Book Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

  • Ho Che Anderson
  • ISBN: 1560976225

Anderson’s work chronicles the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., from boyhood as a son of a pastor to his increasing prominence as an agitator for civil rights, to his assassination in Memphis. Unlike many works on King, this one does not present him as a saint, instead painting him as a bold and eloquent speaker who is also a womanizer, more than a little vain, and occasionally forced to compromise against his better judgment.

The story is somewhat episodic, presenting relevant events and maintaining them long enough to give a sense of history and import, then leaving them as soon as the purpose is served–in many cases in the middle of a conversation or even the middle of a sentence.

The book is notable not only for its even treatment of King but also for its considerable research and its general historical accuracy, including its mention of COINTELPRO and police brutality and its representation of schisms with strikingly different views on how to proceed towards civil rights and even whether the struggle is worth it.

Still I suspect that at least one of the conversations in the book is fictionalized–the private discussion between JFK and MLK while walking through the gardens at the White House–but the work as a whole remains both educational and entertaining as well as emotionally involving.

Anderson’s art takes a number of different styles, starting off fairly stark and realistic (as shown above) and introducing splashes of color and increasing experimentation as the story continues. The layouts become more fluid and vivid as the artwork ranges from iconic, approaching abstract, to paintings made over photographs. The final section of the book is remarkable for its intensity as the Memphis hotel nears: the art is impressive but also very much in service of the story.

In spite of these strengths the book does have its flaws, including a half-dozen typos, mostly in the middle of the book, and one of them inexcusably during the “I Have a Dream” speech (specifically, the mention of “farmer slaves”).

The book remains worth reading: the writing is compelling and the art shows a talented and creative mind at work taking no artistic choice for granted.

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