Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Wallace says hello.
14:34 x Thomas x /random/personal/filthy_beasts x link x 1 comment
Not a single effect has occupied my time as much as distortion in the three years that I've played bass. Chorus? Set it thick and shiny, then forget about it. Envelope? As long as it quacks, I'm not particular. Slap? Crank the compression and drop the mids. But getting a good fuzz bass has been like Pulling Teeth, pardon the pun.
Even for a traditional bassist, I think distortion is a challenge. Guitarists get all the best high-gain pedals, but those same effects tend to filter out the low frequencies, with the end result that the bass disappears in the mix. Dedicated bass pedals started adding a blend knob to combine dry signal with the overdrive. For some settings, this works--on others, the Blend knob doesn't really blend, and it sounds like two instruments playing simultaneously, or even worse, a horde of bees following a weak bass around.
For players who just want a little growl, the sound is easier to achieve. I hear a lot of good comments from Sansamp Bass DI users, which can create a growling tube amp sound. But I'm not a low-gain player. Even when I played more conventional bass roles, I wanted to be able to fill a huge space of sound. Nowadays, I need a distortion that can be a jack of all trades--good on single lines or chords, giving me a full-bodied low end as well as a sharp high fuzz. I could pretty much get that from the MXR M-80 live, but when recording it was hit or miss. And since I record my loop performances to a single track, I needed it to consistently sound right without a lot of extra EQ.
Moving to the VST effects rig was the perfect chance to be able to create my own distortion from a blend of the many free plugins available, and I spent three nights tweaking it until I could get a good result in the mix of several songs. I'll post a cover of something in a sketchpad as an illustration as soon as possible. Here's how I cooked up an overdrive that doesn't make me cringe.
First of all, I knew that the best bass distortions usually involve at least two different amps blended together. Tim Commerford, who may have the best single-line bass sound in rock, uses three amps with increasing amounts of dirt in each. John Entwhistle, whose bass sound was groundbreaking, split the sound by into separate high and low frequencies, then ran them through a mix of guitar and bass amplifiers. So my first goal was to achieve the same thing through two different plugins, EQ'd to fit together into one big sound. In Phrazor, you do this by using the two busses for each effects track--one receives dry signal, and the other is wired in series, with separate input volumes for each.
For the bass half, I used Audio Damage's Fuzz Plus 2. The Fuzz Plus actually doesn't do a great fuzz in my opinion--it's more of a very heavy drive. That's perfect for a growling low end that'll support but won't stick out too cleanly. I dimed the fuzz control, but cut the tone all the way down (Phrazor tells me it's set at 400Hz). On top of that sound, I ran a second signal chain through the series bus with a Tube Screamer into a Marshall JCM 900 amp emulation, both from the Simulanalog Guitar Suite. The Tube Screamer gives the amp a bit more oomph, just like its real-world counterpart, and the Marshall preamp has its lows removed and its mids severely cut. That gives me a wide high-end fuzz to sharpen and define the lower frequencies.
Balancing those two signals together gave me a full, uniform fuzz, but it was still a bit too digital-sounding. That's happened to me before, like when I tried to crank the overdrive for Sketchpad 6 ("Strange Chemistry") and ended up with harshness and clipping. To tame the harsh high frequencies without blunting the amp's sound, I added a low-pass filter after the amp simulation. A low-pass does exactly that: it lets frequencies below a certain point through, but anything higher is removed. The filter is set at around 9KHz, which is very restricted (most people can hear past 16KHz). Normally, a filter set that far down would make the amp sound muffled as all the treble was removed, but I also raised the resonance, so that frequencies near the cutoff were actually boosted. The harshness was still far enough past the cutoff to be eliminated, and the resonance accentuated particular thicker parts of the fuzz. The end result was a classically scooped high-gain distortion, but one that has lower gain at the bass end for a meatier tone. I could probably still spend weeks or years tweaking it, but it's a solid and reliable foundation for recording.
...I hope.
14:48 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 1 comment
Cliches from the Bottom of the Barrel
Have you been wondering how to write a forgettable science-fiction/fantasy novel, but don't know where to start? Do you find yourself confused by problems of originality and taste? Would you like to write pulp, but you're looking for something that's a little less work and a bit more forgettable? As an occasional reader of the worst fiction on the planet, and therefore clearly an expert on everything, I'd like to offer my help. Here's a quick list of do's and don'ts for the struggling hack. I'll try to reference titles from the Baen Free Library, in case you want to do further research.
Beside the empty bookshelves-more light cherry from Levinger's-were boxes of books, also waiting to be shelved. ... Beth had stocked the kitchen ... Mostly microwave stuff, he suspected, to go with the mother-of-all-microwaves sitting in silent splendor on the white-marble kitchen counter. ... It was too quiet, suddenly, and he walked over to the rack and turned on WQXR, the local classical station. ... He took his bags into the bedroom and once again was confronted by newness. The bedroom was small, only 14x14, with just enough room for a double bed with a bookcase headboard. The bed, covered with a thick, red, silk-covered goosedown comforter ... was a classier version of one of those adjustable beds you saw on late-night TV commercials. The headboard had built-in lamps and his new alarm clock (retro-Deco to match the building) nestled cozily in a nook that would be difficult to reach if he wasn't awake. On top of the matching bureau was a smaller television, and one of those nifty-keen Bose Wave radio/CD players. The curtains were the same glowing red silk as the comforter. There was another sheepskin rug-dark brown this time-on the floor in front of the bed; it reminded Eric slightly of a large flat dog.
I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm right there. Also, a little dirty.
10:39 x Thomas x /fiction/writing/technique x link x 1 comment
The Triplets of Belleville
It is not a trick: the English audio track on the DVD for The Triplets of Belleville is almost completely in French. I think there's some English at the start and the end, but it was muffled and it might have just been my imagination. But the charm of this movie is that it doesn't matter. There's almost no dialogue in The Triplets. Instead, it merges an art style that's reminiscent of 1930's caricatures with the attention to movement detail of Miyazaki. The story is ostensibly about an old woman and her dog, who set off to the distant city of Belleville to find her grandson, who was kidnapped while riding in the Tour de France. It's a surprisingly dark little story, with moments that are strange but not surreal. By the end, you haven't really learned any profound lessons, but you weren't really meant to. The old woman is charming, the sense of humor is sly and understated, and the sound design is exceptional.
Brick
You have probably heard good things about Brick. It's a throwback to film noir, but set in a rough suburban high school, complete with drama club femme fatales and a kingpin who runs drugs from his mother's basement. I watched it twice--partially because I enjoyed it very much, and partially because I couldn't catch it all the first time. It helps very much to be familiar with the conventions of noir, because Brick doesn't go out of its way to explain the plot, which is complicated and filled with doublecrosses. Almost every character is lying about something, and the hard-boiled mumbling can be hard to follow. But if you don't sweat the plot too much and crank the volume, some real gems can make it through the marble-mouthed dialogue, like when the main character tells the manipulative gangster's moll "I can't trust you. If I got your help, I'd have to tie up one eye to watch both your hands, and I can't spare it." Like any neo-noir after Memento and The Usual Suspects, Brick can be too complex across acts for its own good, but scene by scene it's razor sharp.
Downfall
This is a movie about the last days of Hitler's life, stretching about two and a half hours. I couldn't make it through. It's not that it's badly done. It's more that we are already aware, I hope, that Hitler was an insane jackass. No matter how cunningly acted and shot, there is no real sense of discovery here, unless you are realizing that you are really glad you weren't in a bunker with Hitler. Again, that shouldn't be a kind of revelation.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/capsule x link x 0 comments
This project for a wireless mouse controlled by rolling it around inside a cloth sack is very cool--they're calling it soap, because it's like rolling a bar of soap in your hand. Cheap and easy to make, too. Cue lots of jokes about dropping the Soap, but it does look like a really good way to control a GUI wirelessly without having to use a surface or adjust to a trackball. I'm filing it under Gaming because they tested it playing Unreal Tournament.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/hardware/control x link x 0 comments
Musical Sketchpad, Session Nine
If I can call you Betty, Betty you can call me "Mastermind"
A month later, and I've finally gotten around to writing some lyrics for this song. This is what David Byrne would call a "monster" version--the lyrics aren't completely set, the recording quality is up and down, and there's still work to be done to make it gel. But I think this is finally starting to go from riff to song. Next month I'll try to have a final version, as well as a final recording of "Strange Chemistry" and a re-written version of an older song, bringing my total of originals to seven.
This sketchpad was also done completely virtually, by hooking my Phrazor VST effects rig into Ableton Live Lite and recording from there. Ableton's not my perfect DAW, but it lets me record post-effects, and Cubase LE won't, so for now it's all I've got. The quality is different from recording through my physical pedals, and I'm not sure if it's actually better yet. The distortion is too soft--I overreacted to the treble I heard in my good phones. Something I'd like to try is to record just the clean audio with the midi messages from my controller, letting me tweak effects or maybe even correct faulty presses after the fact.
I dig the bass synth at the end. If I can think of a structural change I want to make, it mainly has to do with transitioning between verse to chorus and back--too abrupt.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/sketchpad x link x 0 comments
Welcome to Animal Crossing, Comrade
I'm more than $300,000 in debt to a raccoon in an ill-fitting suit. My neighbors are a barely-coherent zoo sometimes prone to veiled drug references (could there be a better description of false consciousness?) I am singlehandedly responsible for filling a local museum. And I have a pretty sweet picture of Lenin in my living room, right next to the moon and a shark pit.
Welcome to Animal Crossing, Comrade.
Animal Crossing is in some ways Nintendo's answer to the sandbox genre, like Grand Theft Auto. There's no end goal, no overarching plot, and no forced behavior--just a village with some creepy mail-obsessed animals and a whole bunch of stuff you can collect. At first glance, it's a game about ownership. And that put the socialist in me a little bit on edge. So I decided to wander around the game with a more devout Marxist's eye, see if there's really an unconscious ideology behind the cheery surroundings. Can we say the same about other games, as similar products of a capitalist system? Or have I finally fallen off the deep end?
Going by the photos, we might have to argue the latter.
I want to take a moment and offer this to any less leftward-leaning readers: the viewpoints I'm offering here aren't entirely the ones that I hold. If I had to lay out my own political viewpoint, it would be more socialist-democrat--I believe in markets, but I also believe in regulation and I don't trust corporations to do the right thing. At the same time, remember that the dominant narrative for cultural examination in this country is from a capitalist, if not a libertarian, viewpoint. Although the political right will sometimes attempt to paint the left as being a group of overt Lenin-worshipping central planners, you would be hard pressed to find a politician or journalist who does not hold as simple fact the superiority of a corporate market economy over all other systems. Undermining this assumption can be an interesting way of examining--and then possibly reaffirming--those biases in a self-critical, honest way. Besides, strip out the references to communism, and what I say here may not seem that radical.
If someone wanted to play Animal Crossing as a socialist, it's surpringly open to the possibility. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," except that you really have no needs, other than those you bring to the game. The housing loan does not ever have to be paid off. You can, through scavenging and barter with the neighbors, acquire some property without ever handing a cent to Tom Nook. Fruit, money, and furniture literally fall from the trees when you shake them--you don't have to eat the fruit, or eat anything, but you can if you want to. It's perfectly possible to bypass the entire buying furniture/upgrading your house rat race. A player could instead occupy themselves by talking to the other villagers, or visiting other players online. It's good, clean, Marxist fun... or is it?
The Man and his System won't let us off that easy. Like it or not, a significant portion of Animal Crossing is still about ownership, materialism, and capitalism, even if you're not actually required to own anything. How can this be? Well, for one thing there is an implicit reward system in place for players to collect more useless items (and they are useless--most objects in the game don't actually do anything except exist). Consider this: apart from the four character slots (hat, accessory, shirt, and equipment), objects can only be viewed when placed inside your own house. Everywhere else, they manifest to the player only as a leaf icon and a name. Since the only thing the various collectibles are good for is to be seen and arranged, and this provides much of the variety in Animal Crossing, the space inside the player's house is a direct representation of their freedom.
And house size is a direct representation of money spent on upgrades. Increasingly expensive upgrades. Ones that require you to either fish or farm obsessively. It's not for no good reason that people who play this game tend to refer to Tom Nook (the shopkeeper/landlord/proletariat capitalist dog) as a slave-driving, exploitative criminal--except that the game won't let them take the next step and remove him from power.
Workers of the Wild World, you have nothing to lose but your chains!
Even with these gripes, the consumption impulse of Animal Crossing is relatively gentle and unforced. Although it is nice to have the extra space, item collection can be relegated to one of many town options--terraforming, painting, and visiting are all free or cheap, and all can be just as, or more, satisfying. Instead, we should treat this as an example of the entire "collection" gameplay tool, which has become far more widespread. As I noted while talking about casual games, the impulse to pokemonetise has become much more widespread and accepted.
This is disturbing on two levels. First, it is reinforcing the message that the collection of things is not only valued, but an end in and of itself. Second, as The Red Critique pointed out, gaming offers escapist entertainment that replaces real change. Ironically, many video games feature themes of overturning corrupt corporations or fighting against injustice, yet the purchase of those games subsidizes the corporate capitalism that probably fueled a worker's need for escape in the first place. With the rise of Second Life and other virtual environments, the Internet philosophy of "free and equal information" has extended to the perceptions of the games themselves. Sure, anyone can get anywhere in Second Life, given enough time--but who has the time? Only those with sufficient resources and time to waste. Like it or not, virtual achievement is still linked to real privilege.
So just out of curiosity, what would a game look like if it avoided these capitalist biases? What do I look like, a designer? If we were to actually take the implications of the last few paragraphs seriously, the only conclusion to reach is that participation in gaming in the first place is a waste of time. By paying money for games--even by playing them on equipment built by workers in unfair working situations--we perpetuate an exploitative capitalism. Our choices are not restricted only to different means of consumption, and we must find alternatives. Screw gaming. Viva la revolucion!
But since I am not quite that hardcore, I'll offer a few thoughts. Perhaps a Marxist game designer would eliminate points and collectibles, to disincentivize consumption as well as to place more emphasis on the humanity of the worker. Maybe using the game to train people for political action (A Force More Powerful) would be a goal of this revolutionary designer. A nation simulation might try to show that (at the very least) providing for the health and welfare of workers creates a more successful country (we are edging into propaganda here, of course). It might tie itself to real life events, since (at least in its early forms) Marxism was intended to a practical, action-oriented political pilosophy. But at the very least, I think a socialist might try using a game--at its lowest levels, a collection of rules and systems--to show how the rules and systems of commerce can be cruel and exploitative. Most people that I talk to don't seem to understand that socialists aren't just Stalin and Mao, but covers a wide gradation of ways to understand market structures. We've been tarred with the Soviet Union for a long time now, and we need better PR.
I'll leave you not with a deep thought or some kind of armchair programmer wisdom, but with my favorite quote from the Red Critique article (emphasis mine):
Take that, video game violence debate! You know, I really think a surprising amount of that piece was sensible and reasoned, but then they toss a line like that in there. Even if I disagree, I insist that it is awesome to see it so frankly expressed.
This piece was inspired, in part, by Johnny Pi's excellent post on casual games and political action.
13:47 x Thomas x /gaming/perspective x link x 1 comment
In less provocative territory between games and culture, Jeff reminded me that Q Entertainment (Rez, Meteos, Lumines) will include a sequencer in their next game. Which is pretty cool for people who thought Electroplankton was too unstructured--but the test will be how it lets you store and share tunes.
09:16 x Thomas x /gaming/society/art x link x 1 comment
In a fawning interview with Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan says:
"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static."
Shorter Bob Dylan:
My initial reaction to the story, when told in the hallway at work:
Best MusicThing comment (emphasis mine):
00:00 x Thomas x /music/artists/dylan x link x 0 comments
After two days of work, the process of virtualizing my pedalboard has taken a big step forward with the emulation of my Line 6 DL4 in Mobius. You can get the scripts here, and Mobius itself is a free download. The process of moving my effects rig to a laptop may be a really bad idea, but it wasn't even a possibility until I got this running.
The essential functionality I missed from the DL4's looper is the Play Once button, which I think was inspired by the Boomerang loop pedal. If Play Once is pressed while the loop is active, the mode is armed and the loop will stop playing after the current cycle. If the loop isn't active, the loop will play once (huh!), then stop. Pressing the button while Play Once mode is armed will stutter the loop, restarting it from the beginning of the cycle, kind of like a skipping CD.
I hadn't realized, until I began looking for software alternatives, how much I've used these functions in my compositions and covers. On "My Foundation," for example, I use it to trigger the chords in the chorus. In a lot of songs, Play Once sets the loop to end, while I simultaneously switch my other effects off or on--something I otherwise wouldn't have enough feet to do!
Now, it's not clear if I'm an oddity or if I just haven't transitioned fully to the dominant looping paradigm, but most other people with this kind of equipment don't seem interested in these functions--and it shows in the tools they write. Loopy Llama is a fine enough plugin, but it's clearly been coded by someone who has either more equipment than I do or a very different musical approach. Mobius itself is itself an emulation of the Gibson Echoplex Digital Pro unit, and so it doesn't even technically have a "stop" function, just different modes of "mute."
Luckily, you can script Mobius, and it has an almost obscene amount of capabilities. The difficult part is overloading one button, so that it will trigger different effects depending on where the user is set, at the proper time (hardest of all). So while the other two are nice (having Record and Overdub on the same button saves space, as does Play/Stop), it's the Play Once button that caused me the biggest headaches. But I'm proud to say that it should work properly now, assuming that you let it use the InsertMode variable to store its state, and you don't have some weird quantize settings. It wouldn't be hard to change the script to handle that, but this is a good starting point.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/looping x link x 0 comments
The UK office for Microsoft has commissioned training videos starring David Brent. Unlike the AV Club Hater, who writes "I don't really know what these videos are supposed to train you for, other than comedy," I think these are brilliant training tools because Brent is such a blatantly horrible person. The method is simply to point out a "Microsoft Value," let him riff off on some hilariously wrong direction, and let the contrast illustrate the point for you. It's perfect for a software company, because it's a little dorky and quoteable, but it doesn't beat the viewer over the head with the obvious point.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/television/the_office x link x 6 comments
A documentary by Nate Harrison explains the "Amen break," which is the most famous (and overused) sampled breakbeat in modern music. I've seen this wander around the music forums, but figured other people might be interested.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital/sampling x link x 0 comments
I now own a used MIDI pedal. I am the dork with the laptop. But unfortunately, Niall's Pedal Board seems to take issues with the window manager in Windows 2000--at least, that's the only reason I can think of that it would work on an XP machine, but none of my Win2K laptops at home. And since I'm skipping the upgrade cycle until Vista, that means it's not very useful.
As an alternative, I've been playing with Phrazor for a couple of days, and it seems to do the same kinds of things that Forte does, but for much cheaper. Right now, fully functional betas are free to download, and you can pre-order the final version for 29 Euro, or about $40 (much cheaper than it will probably be once released). It takes a little while to understand--signal chains are built as "tracks" and then you recall their states with MIDI Note On messages--but it seems much more intuitive than the patchbay style interfaces for Bidule or Psycle. In fact, it's very reminiscent of Live.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
I have an article up for the Government Solutions center at AIIM - The Electronic Content Management Association (formerly the Association for Information and Image Management). It's on local government record-keeping, which is not terribly exciting but not terribly strenous either. I know it's kind of a weird thing for me to cover, but this is one of the contacts I made at the mediabistro event, and I figure a little business reporting experience never hurt anyone. You can find it here, but you might have to register in order to get to it. I won't be offended if you don't.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/articles x link x 0 comments
Video Games and the (De)Skilling of Labor
Located at The Red Critique, by Rob Wilkie. I will have comments on it soon, but I didn't want it to get lost amongst my vast and impenetrable rhetoric.
The magazine itself, by the way, professes to be run by some serious communists. Not socialists, but actual profit-is-theft, fighting-for-150-years communists. They describe the actions of people like me as "strategies of appeasement, reconciliation by negotiations, and the pragmatic compromises of the North-Atlantic bourgeois left." That is pretty awesome. Honestly, I'm a little jealous.
14:13 x Thomas x /gaming/society/class_and_race x link x 1 comment
Found
while searching for images of Tom Nook for Secret Article
Goodness.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/software/animal_crossing x link x 0 comments
I know it's a different guy (obviously), but the fact that Kenneth Lay was just appointed World Bank Treasurer is pretty funny. In a "good thing I don't believe in omens" kind of way.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events/staff x link x 0 comments
My pedalboard is hyperthreaded
You start with the small stuff: the bundled plug-ins for Krystal, or maybe trying to find a better Audacity reverb. Then you get your hands on a real recording interface, which comes with a basic commercial DAW--Ableton Live Lite, or Cubase LE. The rush goes right to your head, especially when you stumble onto KVR Audio. Thousands of VST plugins, for free! Reverbs! Distortion! Even MIDI-controlled soft-synths. They make 12-step programs for those.
Still, you tell yourself you're just doing a little recording. You can stop any time you want--you just don't want to.
But one day you realize that these plugins are running in real-time--that they don't have to be applied to pre-recorded audio. They could even be used like guitar pedals--but cheaper, and all contained in a laptop. You find yourself researching virtual pedalboard technology until two in the morning.
Trust me, I know. And I'm your enabler, kids.
Is it actually a good idea to switch from standalone pedals to VST effects for an instrument signal chain? It depends on your circumstances. Virtual Studio Technology has many of the advantages of multieffects boxes--it's extremely tweakable, flexible, and cheap. It even has a step up in modularity--unlike a Digitech RP-100 or similar box, if you don't like a VST distortion, you can just replace it. There are plenty to choose from. And there are lots of specialized VST plugins that you can't really get in a stompbox form, like bitcrushers and vinyl simulators. Imagine it as a build-your-own multi-fx kit.
On the other hand, you might not actually be saving any space or money. You need a laptop, an interface, and some kind of controller (unless you plan on pecking away at the keyboard while you play, which I don't recommend). At least one of those probably has to be on wall power. Reliability could be a concern: the OS probably won't crash, but the plugins or their host might. The tools are complex--a lot of them are designed almost like an analog synth. And of course, you get to be the dork with the laptop onstage.
If you decide to give it a shot, remember that you don't need top-of-the-line hardware to run VST effects. It's always nice to have more power, but I've run multiple plugins without noticeable latency on a 366 Celeron laptop. Having a good sound driver is much more important than your processor speed if you're just going to use four or five effects.
Obviously, the question for me is not "can it be done?" but "can it be done cheap?" The answer is a reserved maybe. The effects may be free, but you need a VST host program to run them, and you need to be able to bypass them individually. That seems to be easier said than done. I've spent some time searching, and here's what I've found:
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
The World Bank slows down a lot during the late summer, until it ramps up for the annual meetings again. I've actually been fairly busy, but only because about half the department is out on vacation. So there hasn't been much in the way of new B-SPAN material, and the most recent podcast pulls from the archives.
But it's a great pull: Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty and Director of the UN Millennium Project, spoke in 2004 on his approach to poverty. Sachs is kind of a brute-force development expert: he believes that while corruption can be a factor, the real problem in development is donor stinginess and lack of will. Whether or not you agree (William Easterly, author of the excellent The Elusive Quest for Growth and no fawning Bank panderer, considers it foolish), Sachs is a gifted speaker whose passion is inspiring to hear.
P.S. If you want to see something really disgusting, check out the comments on this Daniel Drezner post about Sachs' plan. Perhaps my "favorite" is here:
Don't kid yourself. Poor Africans are mentally deficient, and giving them $50 a year will no more raise them from poverty than giving each American their SS money will provide for their retirement.
$150B in the hands of 3 billion retarded people will cause every huckster, con man, fast talker, religious nut, and hoodlum to devour the entire continent.
Wow.
You know, I've commented on this before (back when I had my own conservative troll), so I probably shouldn't be so shocked, but it still takes me by surprise. Even if you think Sachs is an idiot, $150 billion for his initiatives isn't really that much money on the scale of the US budget. The fact that some are so disproportionately opposed to aid really worries me.
12:56 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 1 comment
Okay, the lights are back on, and everything seems to be where I left it. Guess Neureal fixed their DNS issues. Now, who's got an opinion?
Oh, yes. I do.
I'm typing from a Konsole window on my first Linux installation. I'm impressed by how slick the GUI is, and a little bit amazed at how unhelpful Linux still manages to be. Would it kill you guys to write just a paragraph on (for example) the four different partition formats I'm given? Sure, I can google it, but I probably shouldn't have to.
Also, the live CD (try out the whole OS from a bootable CD before you install) is really slick. But you can't tell me that most people really want to go around downloading a 700Mb ISO before they install. It's such a weird mix of technical savvy and personal cluelessness.
12:02 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 1 comment
George Allen, Virginia's elected senator and a well-known Confederate sympathizer, is an idiot. At a campaign event, he picked out an American of Indian descent (apparently the only person of color present), and mocked him with a word that is either A) nonsensical, B) a racist term for North Africans, or C) a species of monkey. Even with the benefit of a doubt, what could he have been thinking?
00:00 x Thomas x /politics/local x link x 0 comments
The topic of the Round Table this month is casual gaming. And that's a surprisingly hard term to pin down, because as other panelists have noted people can get pretty deep into other "casual" entertainments, like crossword puzzles or office softball or thermonuclear engineering.
But this is not ultimately different from other hobbies. I watch very little television. We could say that I am a "casual watcher." It's an entertainment of last resort, usually. But I have a few shows (Battlestar Galactica, Project Runway) that I follow fanatically. Are those just not "casual shows?" (Perhaps not. Don't think about this example too hard.)
I think (and half-remembered comm texts seem to back me up on this) that we seek out media that fills a specific need, much the same way that we look for "confirmation bias" in political sources. If our needs are filled by a game more strongly, then we might play it more seriously, even if it is technically a casual game. If we don't feel that craving often, or if other options are competing for time (explaining my fluctuating habits), we might play harder games in a lightweight, fleeting fashion.
It's not that games have become more casual, or that they will do so in the future. It's that they've gotten better at accomodating both types of playing habits. The Pokemon design trend means there's more to do (although arguably it's just more tedium) with any given title, for the hardcore players. For the less obsessive, save points have become more accommodating, levels aren't necessarily as long, and difficulty curves have flattened.
The first step in the trend was the tutorial level, which nowadays both introduces the game and its controls/mechanics. You didn't have to read a manual anymore. Then there's context sensitivity (hopefully displayed with onscreen prompts) so that I don't have to remember what button does what, if I pick up a game months after the last time I played it. Alternately, there's a buttonmashing approach, where the controls are easy and forgiving enough that a new player could just mash their way through--see: Tekken. I can't stand Tekken personally, I think it's the easy reader of fighters. But for a friend of mine, it's perfect, because he doesn't need to learn any combos or special moves. He starts a game every couple of months, maybe, has fun just reacting to the events onscreen, and then shelves it again. My friend is dismayed to learn that there are high levels of Tekken play, where people do learn combos and strategies, but at least he never has to learn them.
The point is that it's not an either-or proposition. There's the potential to play many games in casual spurts, or in long, dedicated sessions. The real development has been the fulfillment of that potential.
Who else wants to talk?
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/roundtable x link x 0 comments
Travelers rejoice! The United States Threat Level, as maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, has been moved from Red to Orange for air travel. Passengers are no longer Severely Threatened, but may now take comfort in being Highly Threatened.
With all this Threat Level activity, I had to check my calendar to make sure we weren't at mid-term elections already.
Which is not to imply that the Department of Homeland Security has become simply a politicized bureau of fearmongering for the purposes of a Republican party desparately gripping the reins of power. (After Katrina, do I even have to imply that?) But in my personal observations, a funny fact has emerged: anxiety at terrorism seems to increase with distance from likely targets. John Rogers has noticed the same thing:
I may have shared too much there.
To be honest, it's not like I'm a brave man. I'm not. At all. It just, well, it doesn't take that much strength of will not to be scared. Who the hell am I supposed to be scared of? Joseph Padilla, dirty bomber who didn't actually know how to build a bomb, had no allies or supplies, and against whom the government case is so weak they're now shuffling him from court to court to avoid the public embarassment of a trial? The fuckwits who were going to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches? Richard Reid, the Zeppo of suicide bombers? The great Canadian plot that had organized over the internet, was penetrated by the Mounties on day one, and we were told had a TRUCK FULL OF EXPLOSIVES ... which they had bought from the Mounties in a sting operation but hey let's skip right over that. Or how about the "compound" of Christian cultists in Florida who were planning on blowing up the Sears Tower with ... kung fu.
A while back, we had some people running around the DC metro area with sniper rifles, taking potshots at completely random people. At the time, I was still at GMU, which has an open campus. And yet, what could you do? Not go to gas stations? Freak out every time you saw a white van? There was really nothing a single individual could do to stop the snipers from killing them while they walked back from Home Depot, except stay in the house all day watching The View.
Needless to say, Barbara Walters and Star Jones didn't really see an increase in viewership.
There are signs here at the World Bank, explaining that--in the event of a chemical or biological weapon attack--the air filtration system can keep us safe for something like four hours. They do not explain, probably because it goes without saying, that not only are we the World Bank, a huge symbol of international globalization, but we are one block from the Bush White House. I am not filled with an incredible feeling of safety when I consider that fact, personally.
But I still come in to work. We all do.
Whereas out where my parents live, in a town of 220 people and a pair of chihuahuas, the volunteer fire department has actually used town funds to take anti-terrorism courses. A couple hundred people, two hours from DC, without even a stop light, and yet to listen to them, you'd think Osama Bin Laden himself was going to personally crash a plane into the Handy Mart. ("They hate us for our freedom and our easily accessible beef jerky.")
It does my heart good to see attitudes coming around on the Iraq war. Honestly. I am so happy to see that apparently storming into another country on a flimsy pretext and attempting forceful democratic reform was perhaps a losing proposition. It would have been nice if we'd learned that lesson before a couple thousand US soldiers and who knows how many Iraqis were killed, but let's try and look on the bright side. One of these sides must be brighter. Just keep turning it over until you find it.
But it would also be nice if we could get back to the root cause of that policy: the way the rest of the country freaks out every time that some Al-Qaeda wannabe manages to tie his shoes together. A foreign policy driven by fear and reactionary panic is not a good way to run a country. Maybe we could give cynicism a shot instead.
00:00 x Thomas x /politics/issues/defense x link x 0 comments
Apparently they're doing some server work right now.
That's okay, I don't have much to say this week anyway. Nothing that can be reproduced here, at least.
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 0 comments
Problem: I'm using several virtual instruments, both at home and at work, but I don't have a MIDI keyboard, and even if I did, I'm not a very good piano player. It would also be nice to have transport control inside the booth at work, and that means wireless.
Solution #1: Use a normal USB keypad (or mini keyboard), and route it to MIDI using the command line utilities. There are four rows on a keypad. There are four strings on a bass. Some muscle memory still applies.
Solution #2: Use a gamepad, remapping joystick inputs with Rejoice. Wireless gamepads are relatively cheap, especially if I hack another xBox pad. But how to lay out the notes? Perhaps something along the lines of Band Brothers for DS.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
Update:
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/television/galactica x link x 0 comments
University City Property Managament has submitted a proposal to the army for a "military theme park" at Fort Belvoir near Springfield. The Post goes on to state that the planned amusement park includes rides that simulate driving an M1 tank, flying a gunship helicopter, or firing the guns of a B-17. It would be estimated to attract 3 million visitors per year.
Even assuming that this isn't a disturbing (and disrespectful) fetishization of our military's war apparatus, Fort Belvoir would be a terrible place to put it. Springfield's "mixing bowl," where the various I-95 highways meet, is so confusing that it has actually scrambled all other roads in a ten-mile radius.
00:00 x Thomas x /dc/gov/army x link x 0 comments
Following in the footsteps of other neologisms, Wired recently crowned the word "ludology" with some semblance of legitimacy. May I present the following alternate definition?
Because in all seriousness, if you can read something like this without feeling like someone is really missing the point, you're a better person than I am.
23:12 x Thomas x /gaming/perspective x link x 1 comment
Wong Kar Wai has a style of framing a scene that I have honestly never seen from anyone else. He constantly uses negative space, shooting around walls and through small windows. There's an awareness of space in Wong's movies, emphasizing how people move through them, and how our man-made environments bring us together, or pull us apart.
2046 takes those elements, as well as most of the principle actors, from In the Mood for Love and Chung King Express. But where those movies were more focused, and their characters more distinctive, 2046 drifts from place to place. It does so beautifully--the cinematography lingers on the rich surroundings, and its color palette is saturated without being garish--but it doesn't really satisfy.
Theoretically, this is a follow-up to In the Mood for Love, taking place after Chow (Tony Leung) has moved on from his affair with a next-door neighbor in the previous film. He's now a playboy, sleeping around with a number of women. The scenes are shuffled, and interspersed with a sci-fi story Chow has been writing, about a man on a train to "2046" who falls in love with a broken android. Somehow, this story is meant to be tied to Chow's various flings, as he becomes involved with his new neighbor (Zhang Ziyi), remembers a past relationship with a professional gambler (Li Gong), and flirts (though without much heat) with his landlord's daughter (Faye Wong).
All of these are fine actors--Faye Wong in particular stole the show from Chung King Express, and Leung is usually convincing for both his comic and dramatic roles. But Wong Kar Wai seems to have locked almost everyone down into themselves for 2046, as if he's less interested in them as characters than as static elements for his composition. Zhang Ziyi is allowed the occasional character quirk, and Chow's editor Ping (a phenomenally ugly man) lends energy to the few minutes he has on screen. But the rest of the time, these characters are too bottled up for anyone to care--there are no cracks in Leung's debonair mask, and as such it's hard not to feel a little repulsed by him, if you feel anything at all. In the end, we're left without much character, much plot, or much spark.
Long story short: 2046 is a pretty slow two hours to look at beautifully-shot hotel rooms.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/foreign x link x 0 comments
Belle's off doing overnight dogsitting for the past week and another two to go. Haven't seen her much, and I guess I'm not going to.
BUT SHE'LL READ THIS.
This is one of my favorite pictures of us.
It kinda sums the whole relationship up.
16:09 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 1 comment
The best part about Valve Software's over-the-Internet purchasing system, Steam, is that it saves you from having to visit video game stores. There are many things to like about gaming as a hobby, but I'm not sure that other gamers are necessarily one of them.
Which you can say about just about any hobby, really. If it weren't for the fact that I like to physically try instruments before I buy them, I'd never go into Guitar Center ever again. There are far too many musicians there.
On the other hand, I wouldn't ever say "I can't stand the bookstore--I keep running into other readers." Perhaps because it's traditional to be quieter around books. The library stigma is beaten into us as children, and the fact that literature is an entirely visual medium requires more concentration, but also presents fewer distractions. There are no doubt really annoying people at the bookstore (probably in the literary fiction and Business How-To sections), but they're not talking.
15:19 x Thomas x /gaming/software/halflife x link x 1 comment
"I'm Canadian, actually. That's like an American, but without a gun."
Because I'm mad with power.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/television/kids_in_the_hall x link x 0 comments
One of my managers comes up to me the other day and asks me if--now that the Bank has all this audio technology--I could put together some "jingles" for the upcoming GDLN World Forum. Basically, when each region is introduced for a presentation or acknowledgement, they want a short musical sting to play. I suggested that instead of creating one piece or going with commercial music (the licensing of which can be awkward), that instead I could write one 15-second chunk of music with instruments and harmonies from each region, and then we could just solo the regional instrumentation for each group.
I'm a little nervous about the assignment. Not because I can't do it on deadline--because the idea of being paid for playing music on the software synth isn't exactly painful. I'm more concerned that I'm a random American being asked to put together music that will represent different regions--not even just individual cultures (if there is such a thing), but large areas that might contain many different cultures and ethnic groups.
The potential to be unintentionally offensive is there, and I don't think I'm overthinking it. In other media, musical cues are often used as a shorthand for racial or cultural jokes--introducing a Japanese character with a gong strike, for example, or giving a character from Jamaica a steel drum theme. It's lazy, a bit disrespectful, and it's certainly not something that the World Bank should be using.
So I'm working off a few guidelines, to keep myself from basically producing a parody of an "edgy" sitcom soundtrack. The first is to request samples of appropriate music as templates from regional experts at the Bank. At least then I can point directly at the sample when asked what were you thinking? Second, I'm making it a basic policy to try to avoid stereotypical instrument choices--no sitars for South Asia, and I'd like to avoid using drums for Africa. That may not be possible, since sometimes those instruments are stereotyped for a reason (a lot of African music does play up the role of percussion), but I hope it will keep me from producing something that's either chintzy or reduces an entire section of the globe to just one country. Finally, I'm going to take advantage of the diversity here at the World Bank, and get at least a couple of opinions on the piece before I hand it over.
Any other guidelines that I should remember? Travesties to avoid? Anecdotes of other bad musical choices? The comments are there for a reason.
Update: On the other hand, the reaction from other Bank staff tends to be "you're making this into way too big a deal." I've been in meetings all day, literally. Maybe I'm just overanalyzing.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 1 comment
00:00 x Thomas x /random/tech x link x 0 comments
New words. Is there any better evidence for the mad world of fast-paced innovation in which we live than the flowering of awkward, tech-related vocabulary? I feel like Tom Friedman just thinking about the promise of this golden age. Where's a helpful taxi driver when you need one? So if you're not part of the solution, join the problem!
Flogging: v. flog-ging. The act of every single person with a blog piling onto the latest (probably stupid) meme, likely a result of a feature on BoingBoing or Slashdot. Derived from blogging, vlogging, moblogging, and a host of other difficult-to-say-with-a-straight-face -og words.
Auto-neurotic: adj. otto-nu-ra-tik. A habitual action taken to create drama or heighten a small annoyance into a large one, as a way to feel more interesting than one actually is. Has become much more attractive now that a host of egocentric online media can grant a personal sleight the same level of presentation and reach as the local news.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/tech x link x 0 comments
The just-released Best of B-SPAN podcast is my first Pro Tools production. As promised, it is almost completely revamped, and includes a musical bed with gratuitous software synthesizers. Probably not very exciting for anyone else, but it's a big step forward--even if Pro Tools is driving me nuts trying to figure out why the busses aren't bouncing to audio tracks.
The funny thing about using a real heavy-duty audio workstation, as opposed to Audacity or a bundled copy of Cubase, is that I'm spending a lot of time in the virtual equivalent of hooking up a VCR. Virtual outputs go to virtual inputs, creating signal chains to do what I want--such as the pre-emptive ducking, which splits the vocal track between a compressor and a delay. In real life it would probably bore me to tears. When it's mouse driven, I could rewire the virtual studio all day long.
13:54 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 1 comment
