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.
Fred Clark, AKA the Slacktivist, tells a story:
"You show them II Timothy 3:16," the teacher said. And then she quoted it, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness."
When I suggested that someone who didn't believe in the Bible wasn't likely to believe in II Timothy any more than they believed in Romans, she responded by quoting another passage, II Peter 1:21, and then another from the 119th Psalm.
It went on like that for a bit, like something from Abbot and Costello, with both of us getting more frustrated as she quoted Bible verse after Bible verse about the authority of the Bible and me not doing a very good job of expressing that someone who doesn't believe in Bible verses won't be convinced by a Bible verse that tells them to believe in Bible verses. Until finally she said this:
"Well if they still don't believe in the Bible after you've showed them all those verses, then I guess they just can't read."
In addition to his highly-entertaining and interesting Left Behind Fridays, the Slacktivist is always a good read because he has thought carefully about his evangelism, and clearly decided that the communication it implies cannot be one-way. So instead of making preaching the gospel his only contact with the secular world, he basically invites readers in to understand the culture surrounding the religion.
It is heartening to know that this communication takes place somewhere. I don't much worry about a disconnect between political parties. I am more concerned that the split between Left and Right in America reflects a basic misunderstanding between two subcultures--one of which is a paranoid rural mindset that shares a language and vision deeply rooted in the Bible, while the other is a more fragmented urban population that does not share in the heavily coded (and therefore incomprehensible) language of scripture and dominionism. Most of the people I know in cities, even those who are quite conservative, aren't really able to grasp the reality of the former. They are operating on a thought-experiment of what the rubes want, and catching a glimpse of the actual rural agenda is a rude surprise.
This works the other way, of course, as the story above shows. But frankly, the dominionists are better organized than we seem to be, and we are increasingly in their power. At the very least, we'd better be able to figure out what they're going to do with us.
11:14 x Thomas x /culture/religion/evangelical x link x 1 comment
It's the jumbo shrimp of music
Still swamped at work, but I've been trying to figure something out:
Ostensibly, there is a genre of music known as "Christian rock," which confuses me. Apart from how much "Christian rock" is terrible and disturbing bilge masquerading as music, it sounds to me like a contradiction in terms. I thought the whole point of rock music was to rebel against the kinds of wholesomeness and good will represented by, say, Jesus.
So are there other genres out there that invoke the same cognitive dissonance? Does someone make, for example, "Satanic gospel?" And if so, where can I listen to some?
Feel free to leave suggestions and other mind-bending genre combinations in the comments.
17:15 x Thomas x /random/comedy_and_tragedy x link x 1 comment
Via Hackaday, a high-school kid in Texas has converted his Jeep Cherokee into an electric-only vehicle. It's only got a 40-mile or so range, but considering that it's practically the most un-aerodynamic vehicle possible, I'm impressed. His web site documents the process and results extensively. There's a bright future out there for this kid.
00:00 x Thomas x /science/environment x link x 0 comments
NPR opens position of official blogger
The job requires blogging and journalism experience, a wide range of interests, and broadcast/podcast expertise.
And me with eight months left at the Bank. I doubt they'd be willing to wait.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/professional x link x 0 comments
Coincidence is a funny thing. I'm not updating much right now partly because I'm trying to stay ahead of schedule with an article for The Escapist, centered on race and gaming. And of course, as I do research, interesting stories keep popping up. I don't want to spend too much time talking about it before I'm done, but I found this Washington Post story on San Andreas (found via Joystiq) to be fascinating and relevant. It talks about the experiences of two sets of gamers playing GTA: a Hispanic family in South Central LA, and a couple of upper-class kids just down the road from me in McLean. The perspectives are excellent, and I think it does a lot to sum up not just the collision of race and entertainment, but also the disconnect between the rich and the poor in the US. Note the closing lines:
With the help of a tattoo artist, a screenwriter and a rap photographer from Los Angeles, "San Andreas" was actually developed in Scotland.
Says a lot, doesn't it?
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/society/class_and_race x link x 0 comments
I Love You But I've Chosen Pro Tools
Very busy this week. Open thread, if anyone wants.
13:35 x Thomas x /bank/experience/personal x link x 1 comment
Oh, I could think of a few choice words
A quick hit, hot off the wires, which I'm sure everyone will be flogging shortly: Apple has decided to legally shut down the use of the word "podcast." Since part of my job description now literally involves producing podcasts, I think I'm qualified to ask the following question:
Is Apple completely insane?
I'm not a big fan of the word podcast in general, but it has a catchy ring and it does roll of the tongue cleanly. More importantly, when I explain this to anyone in the outside, non-geek world, it generally requires at least a few sentences establishing that a podcast does not actually require an iPod. The two are linked, at least by name, strongly in the public ear.
So let's get this straight: there's an entire burgeoning community of content-creators (as well as useless blowhards, to be sure) out there who are driving large parts of iTunes traffic, who represent a hip thing that even the World Bank (read: not the cutting edge) can apply and use, and who are providing exposure for Apple's products just by existing--and Apple basically wants to kill a tremendous part of that advantage. It is a profoundly stupid move.
Oh, and they don't want you making games for their hardware either. Seriously, guys, take a valium and ease back on the control freak urges. You're giving me the creeps.
12:09 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 1 comment
Corvus' Round Table this month is on conventions in gaming. And I'm playing a platformer lately, so my first thought has been DEATH TO BOTTOMLESS PITS AND SPIKES! One could make the case that bottomless pits and spikes are the crates of platform games. Why are Mario and Sonic surrounded by deadly holes? Why would someone put big metal spikes on the ground where people could get hurt (besides the obvious gameplay reason)? It's like Evil Martha Stewart did their landscaping design ("Now I've made these lovely stainless steel impalement devices out of ore that I machined myself. The etching is a simple but homey touch.")
But we could be here all day if we wanted to talk about the gentle surrealism of vintage games. The holes exist for you to jump over them, just as the spikes appear for you to avoid them. These are not admirable reasons for a simulated existence, nor are they at all realistic, but they have a certain Zen appeal.
The convention I really want to discuss is removing the video from video games.
Not in terms of stopping the emphasis on graphics, or advocating for text-based interactive fiction. And I don't mean disavowing the electronic foundation. I like gadgets, and we should keep them around. Tendencies aside, I'm not a luddite.
Basically, when we think about video games, as the name implies, we usually assume that they involve moving images on a screen. Other elements are often remarkably flexible--they might use a non-traditional controller, or the images might just be text, the audio could be marginal or muted, but there's always a screen at which the player stares and interacts.
So what if we got rid of the screen instead?
I'm interested in this partly because I work in an office, watching video or using a computer all day long, and sometimes my eyes hurt. I can't look at another screen some days. And I'm also intrigued by it as a musician and an audio producer. I was thinking the other day about making some fiction podcasts, like 30's-era radio shows, as practice for my production skills, and then I thought: those shows presented stories and drama without visuals, just with creative sound design. Why couldn't they be interactive?
Think about all the Metro riders with white iPod earphones. Digital radio. Podcasts. Brian Eno creating system sounds for Windows 95. Napster being sued by Metallica. Digital audio is here to stay. Yet it's an odd fact that while digital video and interaction have become increasingly sophisticated, audio has actually become more primitive--MP3 and other lossy formats are more portable, but they're steps backward in fidelity and quality. Even as it surrounds us more completely, it's less enjoyable to hear.
I don't know what kind of form you could use. I have these ideas in my head about using acoustic processing (whatever happened to EAX? remember when that was supposed to be a big deal?) to make a bat-like echolocation shooter, but I'm guessing that's probably unworkable. Choose your own adventure? Conversation-based RPGs? Music-based? Bit Generations? Who knows? I just know that from the crowd of solitary, iPodded pedestrians out there, I think there might be a market.
Note: this is not my first audio-related round-table entry. I sense a theme!
Who else wants to talk?
06:13 x Thomas x /gaming/roundtable x link x 1 comment
People often describe our dog Wallace as "handsome," and he is indeed a handsome dog. But is he merely handsome? No! There is a veritable flood of adjectives for this puppy! Words like "tasteful":
"refined":
and "classy":
09:13 x Thomas x /random/personal/filthy_beasts x link x 1 comment
Three Moods of the Noisettes, by the Noisettes
Let's put it this way: Three Moods of the Noisettes is $6 if you can find it at the bookstore or order it from Amazon. For that price you're only getting four tracks--but they're pretty amazing songs, particularly if you've got a blues/rock itch that needs to be scratched. They bring the Rock. Considering that a lot of CDs nowadays, even by good musicians, often contain only three or four really great songs anyway, this is a pretty good deal.
Shingai Shoniwa, lead singer and bass, has a voice that's practically worth the price of admission on its own. It veers from throaty to sweet, Billie Holiday to Joan Jett, sometimes in a single passage. The drums and guitar are strong enough to support Shoniwa, but stay stripped down for speed. Percussion is almost a military shuffle, while the guitarist breaks up the distortion with some creative tremelo and ghost notes.
I'm not sure what the three moods of the title are supposed to be. The opening track, "Don't Give Up," staggers between jazz and punk, before collapsing into "Monte Christo," where Shoniwa and guitarist Dan Smith trade Alice in Wonderland lines about honeybees and the Count. "Signs" is probably the poppiest of the four, based around a riff that wouldn't be out of place on a Killers album. The album closes with "Burn," a glorious six-minute blues vamp.
Three Moods of the Noisettes clearly isn't for everyone--it's unapologetically retro in its inspirations and minimalist in its arrangements. If the singles I've heard are any indication, since this EP the band has moved toward more traditional (and less interesting) production values, which is a shame. As Three Moods shows, there's a lot to be said for a rough but unrestrained mix.
14:29 x Thomas x /music/artists/noisettes x link x 1 comment
To indicate exactly how bad High Tension is will require what we now call "spoilers," although as one critic noted, the movie itself is already beyond spoiled in the traditional sense of the word. It is, in fact, rotten.
A French slasher flick walking a fine line between incompetent homage and lazy theft of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, High Tension centers on a law student named Marie, who takes a trip with her friend Alexia out to the friend's family farm in rural france, where they'll study for what I assume is the French equivalent of the bar exam. It becomes obvious fairly early on that Marie has an unrequited crush on Alexia, and that Alexia is completely oblivious.
But first: what's this, as the girls arrive at the farmhouse? Why, it's a filthy, heavyset figure in an old rusty truck, having some sort of sexual congress with a severed female head, which he dumps out the window when the task at hand reaches completion!
Subtle. I'm guessing a lot of people are going to stop the disc right there, but I've watched Audition. I've seen worse.
Before long, of course, the killer breaks into the house for no apparent reason, butchers Alexia's family, and kidnaps her. Marie narrowly escapes detection and sets off to rescue her friend. At this point, High Tension is derivative and a little strained, but not beyond the horror films it so obviously apes. Director Alexandre Aja knows his way around a camera, even if he doesn't have a lot of original ideas--there's the obligatory gas station scene, the unhelpful phone call to the police, and a power tool straight out of Chainsaw.
Where the movie goes horrifically wrong, and where I will be spoiling what little narrative creativity that High Tension boasts, is in its "twist ending." See, once Marie manages to catch up with the killer, gruesomely dispatch him, and rescue her would-be romantic interest, it is revealed that she was the killer all along. What had appeared to be a flawed but sympathetic description of a strong lesbian protagonist turns out to be a sociopathic sexual deviant.
Even ignoring the gay-bashing incongruity of this Fight Club ripoff, it's just incredibly poor writing. Although the "Keyser Soze" reveal has been around for decades, it still manages to work in films that use it as the final piece of a puzzle, causing viewers to say "ah-hah! now it all makes sense!" Whereas High Tension's twist actually destroys what little narrative coherency that it had left. If she's the killer, then where did that big, rusty truck come from? How does she drive two cars at once? Why did the gas station attendant (and indeed, every other character) treat the killer as an entirely different person? Who called the cops? And why did the psycho spend so much time hunting through the house for her, when there wasn't anyone else to hunt for?
We could try to come up with psychological explanations for these glaring plot holes, but it hardly seems worth it. Clearly, the filmmakers didn't make the effort. I'd recommend you do the same, and leave this one unwatched.
12:32 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/horror x link x 1 comment
Belle: We have to name her!
Thomas: Okay. How about "Pumpkin?" My parents had a tortoiseshell named Pumpkin. She was a good cat.
Belle: But she doesn't look like a pumpkin. When I think of a cat named pumpkin, I think of a big orange cat.
Thomas: Fair enough.
Belle: How about "Meko?" M-E-K-O.
Thomas: Where did that come from?
Belle: shrugs
Thomas: What about "Neko" instead? It's Japanese for cat.
Belle: So we're naming our cat "Cat?"
Thomas: I guess so.
08:42 x Thomas x /random/personal/filthy_beasts x link x 1 comment
I know I shouldn't be expecting much when watching SciFi Channel movies, but when the old "Crisis is danger and opportunity in Chinese" chestnut came up during Painkiller Jane, I was reminded of just how ridiculous that myth is. Not only is it completely false, but it's commonly used by cultural sub-literates like Tom Friedman to, say, relate their taxi-driver's support for globalization.
And here's what really got me: they didn't even use the right character. Instead of weiji, they wrote the hanzi for yi, which means "easy." Then the actor pointed at the top half--that's danger, he said, and the bottom half is opportunity. Well, no. According to Zhongwen.com, yi is a pictogram meant to resemble a lizard. The top half is a radical that usually stands in for the sun and signifies a day (ri), and the bottom can be a negative command (wu).
Is it really that hard to find a single Mandarin-speaking Chinese-American and run this kind of thing by them before you put it on TV? Especially when you're filming in Vancouver?
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/asia/china/mandarin x link x 0 comments
Since Mile Zero is now the #11 on a Google search for "virtual pedalboard" (much to my dismay when I first started looking into using a laptop for my bass effects rig), and since I've had a few searches for information after first writing about it, I'd like to go into depth about the final results. As I've said, I'm not planning on using the laptop live for a variety of reasons, but it does make a fine recording setup.
As usual, I've worked on doing this on the cheap. There are plenty of ways to spend a lot of money for a laptop effects rig--Native Instruments makes Guitar Rig expressly for that purpose--but for many hobbyists like myself, spending a lot of money on that software seems extravagant, and might not go over well with significant others. I also see it as a personal challenge to do more with less.
I did end up purchasing one piece of software to run the pedalboard: Phrazor, which is technically a synthesizer workstation. Phrazor is built to let keyboardists and sequencer-based musicians easily run complex sets of virtual instruments and effects live, but it also hosts audio-based plugins. That makes it versatile enough to adapt for our purposes.
Phrazor provides 64 "Tracks," which are basically 8-slot effect racks. They can be chained or routed to other tracks, before being sent out through the audio channel. My pedalboard project contains one track for effects and another track for the Mobius looper plugin--the mix from the first track is sent to the second, so that the looper gets the complete effects mix.
Each track contains its own mixer. Click here for a screenshot of the effects track routing. There are two busses through the mixer, A and B. Each plugin receives an identical dry signal from the track's input (which can come from external or internal routing) along the A bus. The B bus is wired in series--it gets signal from a previous plugin, in a chain. So you use the A bus to mix multiple effects simultaneously, while the B bus feeds them into each other.
I realize that's tough to wrap your head around, so let's walk through the screenshot by way of illustration. Three effects--the compressor, Tube Screamer, and the Marshall Amp--feed into the B bus. Those effects are meant to be chained together. So when I activate the fuzz preset, my bass signal feeds first into the compressor. From there, it's sent to all plugins along the B bus, but most of them are muted. The first unmuted plugin is the Fuzz Plus, so I get my low-end distortion from there. At the same time, the signal also passes from the compressor into the Tube Screamer, which is muted but hooked into the signal chain (see the yellow arrow, indicating that its output is sent to the next plugin along bus B). The Tube Screamer sends to the Marshall, also muted and in series, before it finally emerges through the unmuted low-pass Filter. Because the last set of plugins have their A inputs muted, they get only wet signal from the previous plugin, and no dry signal from the main track Input.
By controlling the mixer's muting and signal flow, I can control which effects are heard and which ones are effectively bypassed. For my envelope pedal, for example, I mute everything except the GreenMachine Wah plugin. Phrazor stores the mixer state--along with any saved plugin presets--in the Track states to the lower right. It switches between those Track states in response to MIDI notes, which I trigger from the floor pedal (click here to see a screenshot of the remote states view). Technically, my floor pedal only sends program change messages over MIDI, but I use MIDI-OX to translate those into note messages for this purpose.
So that's effectively how the pedalboard itself works, but it doesn't explain how to record it. I have two audio workstations that came bundled with my recording hardware. The Tascam US-122 audio interface came with Cubase, which normally I prefer. Unfortunately, Cubase won't record post-effects, so I can't use it for this project. Instead, I host the Phrazor pedalboard as a VST inside of Ableton Live Lite, which came with my M-Audio O2 keyboard.
It barely works: Live Lite 5 only supports four tracks, and Phrazor needs three to run the pedalboard. Click here to see a screenshot of Live set up to record. "1 Audio" receives the bass signal from the interface and hosts Phrazor. In order to get MIDI messages to the plugin, we need a second track--"2 MIDI"--that passes input on to the first track. See how "1 Audio" has its Audio To control set to "Sends Only?" That allows it to feed to another track for recording ("4 Audio") instead of going to the Master output. If we recorded on "1 Audio" we would only be getting the dry signal run through the current Phrazor preset. Recording the MIDI signals as well would theoretically play back the control messages with the audio, but it's easier and more reliable to mix the output to an audio track during the song. The last audio track, "3 Audio," records directly from the microphone for vocals.
I've recorded a low-quality .mp3 of myself using the virtual pedalboard so that you can hear the results of all of this. You can click here to hear a walkthough of my effects board, including a breakdown of the elaborate distortion effect I wrote about in this post, and a familiar tune looped to show off how it all works in practice.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
Musical Sketchpad, Session Ten
My brother's a guitar player, and sent me a jazz song he'd recorded in Audacity. I added drums first using the Impulse sampler in Ableton Live, then played some basic chords with the Hammond B4 patch of the MDA JX-10 soft-synth. Finally, I exported the whole thing and laid down a bassline in Cubase.
On the whole, I think it sounds quite good--better than most of the recordings I do. I'm tempted to start doing more singer-songwriter material outside of the Four String Riot rules.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/sketchpad x link x 0 comments
Just got back from seeing Jon Stewart live (a friend had tickets, and then her boyfriend had to cancel). The show was great, but of course it's a very different thing to see comedy in a giant outdoor auditorium. They have big video screens on either side of the stage, since even for the good seats the performer is many, many yards away. At some point, you realize that you've gone to a live show in order to watch someone on television--and considering that most people come to see Stewart because of his television show in the first place... We're about three levels deeper into the virtualization of entertainment than I'm really comfortable with here.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/pop x link x 0 comments
I'm using a Logitech Trackman at work now instead of a mouse to try to rest my wrists and prevent shooting pains through my hands and arms. It seems to be working nicely, particularly after I swapped the buttons to give my index finger a chance. But note: although the primary means of interaction with a trackball uses your thumb, where did the helpful people at Logitech put the scroll wheel?
Right: exactly where everyone else puts it. Between the two mouse buttons. And since the trackball is actually more curved than a mouse, it's actually harder on my index finger to reach for it now. Now, I love the scroll wheel--incredible idea, use it all the time. And I realize that my inability to cope with this at work is partly due to my lack of admin rights (for Mouseware) and partly to my poor work posture. But honestly, guys: put the wheel where it can be used, right by the marble. I miss my wheel.
Topics to be discussed tonight, after work, time permitting: The Who and Tommy, console interfaces, Corvus's roundtable on genre, and perhaps a new recorded cover.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/tech x link x 0 comments
Thomas Wilburn's patented Scavenger Hunt Huevos
Found ingredients:
Toss the egg into a skillet on medium heat, scramble. Add one slice of cheese. Use a fork to whip these until a little fluffy. Add a handful of tortilla chips, crushing them up. Don't worry about the staleness--they're basically just going to be filler. Pour in salsa and black beans, reduce the heat, crush in another slice of cheese, and stir until the beans are soft. Add the fake hamburger last. It'll thaw quickly.
The end result will look, to be polite, like something the cat dragged in. Spice it with pepper, salt, cumin, and red pepper to taste. I have a weak sense of smell, so I season heavily. Entonces: one cheap pseudo-Mexican meal made from handy ingredients, perfect for when your vegetarian girlfriend is working late and you don't feel like going to the grocery store.
23:05 x Thomas x /random/cooking x link x 1 comment
Harper's has a panel on gaming and learning in the September '06 issue, titled Grand Theft Education. The panel consists of a couple of teachers, Raph Koster, and (everybody's favorite) Stephen Johnson.
I picked it up on a whim at lunch. It's probably 90% Johnson and Koster talking about how great games are, and how they just explain all kinds of things, and how writing strategy guides is a sign of future non-fiction genius. I thought it was pretty tiresome and uncritical, personally, because no-one seemed to be questioning Johnson and Koster's viewpoints or assertions. Frankly, the other panelists came across as intimidated when they spoke at all. To their credit, no-one raised the "video games are teaching our youth to be terrible killers!" canard, either. Low bar: cleared!
And for those who still want to flog the narrative vs. simulation debate, Johnson does insist that
While the last part of that statement isn't completely hive-inducing, a description of narrative as vestigial is by itself almost enough reason for that down payment on a Michigan mountain shack, where my closest contact with the Singularity will be by carrier pigeon.
13:26 x Thomas x /gaming/perspective x link x 1 comment
File under self-promotion: because a large portion of my work at the World Bank Institute has moved over to audio production, I've added a section to my portfolio for audio. It includes a podcast and the musical intros I posted a few days back, but also a radio show that I produced which will be broadcast by satellite to all of Africa. I'm currently involved in another of those radio programs, albeit more as an engineer, and I'll be doing production on the video tutorials for the GDLN's new Event Management System. It's been very busy lately.
When I left college, I wanted to go work for NPR. Of course, I was naive and hadn't had time to build an audio portfolio, so I got no response to my inquiries. My hope is that after this year's contract with the World Bank, I'll have a collection of writing and audio that will let me move into full-time journalism in print or on the radio--probably not at the level of NPR, but higher than freelance on the food chain.
On the other hand, my division manager wandered by the other day. She's a short, pleasantly blunt German. "How's business?" she asked, and I allowed that business might be fine. "I keep hearing your voice on things," she said, adding "It sounds good. We can't allow you to leave here." I think she was joking.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/professional x link x 0 comments
One last set of thoughts to follow up on gaming and its covert biases:
A lot of the gaming blogs out there are about design. They're either by people who make a living from building games, who want to make a living from building games, or who riff on the other two. I don't really care about being a designer myself, because it sounds incredibly boring to me. I don't tend to follow those discussions closely. But I glance around enough to hear talk about "rewards."
Now I realize that this is not always a bad thing. It's not (in the abstract) a bad idea to have a game reward the player for taking actions. It makes good psychological sense. And it can be done well--for example, the "director's commentary" in Half-Life 2: Episode 1 often discusses the methods that the designers would use to make the player enjoy playing, sometimes in subtle ways.
But at the same time, it's profoundly creepy terminology. Rewards? You reward a rat that pulls the correct lever, or a pigeon that pecks the correct button. It's not only disturbing to consider the game as "training," but it also calls into question the views of the designer toward their audience. It smacks to me of megalomania, and a perception of people as simplistic collections of rules.
That perception doesn't exactly take me by surprise. Technologically-oriented people are often rule-oriented. Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish briefly covered the ways in which this structured viewpoint leads to the rampant libertarianism and Rand-worship found throughout Silicon Valley's geek culture. I'm not sure it's a geek thing so much as human nature and pattern recognition. Everyone wants an interpersonal magic bullet.
Which is not to say that people can't be effectively viewed as simple collections of rules, as long as your purpose is solely to manipulate. Again, that's creepy.
And to tie it into the question of grinding and materialism in gaming, this perspective lends itself to the creation of "rewards" for taking part in those boring, intrinsically worthless player activities. Why are you spending three hours in optional random battles during a Final Fantasy game? Because it'll get you a shiny Ultima sword that will let you beat a final boss twice as fast. Why, as pseudonymous asked in comments, do you have to unlock most of the characters in Soul Calibur 2 through a long, hateful, poorly-written and tedious "story" mode? Because obviously you need to be rewarded.
You can't just play the game you paid for. You have to learn to jump through their hoops.
Good dog. Here's a reward.
11:05 x Thomas x /gaming/design x link x 1 comment
After a little departmental and internal drama, I've pretty much finished the regional jingles for the GDLN World Forum. These will be played as introductions for the various speakers and visiting participants. Basically, I went with a common organ/drum pad that resolves to C major over four chords, then added a melody line played by a different instrument for each region. In the overall conference theme, the instruments will trade off with the melody--I'm still working on doing that gracefully. Considering that almost everything was written in Pro Tools on the XPand! software synth, I think it sounds pretty good. Here's three samples:
Kalimba
(Africa)
Guitar (Latin America &
Caribbean)
Sitar (South Asia)
The drum loop was actually lifted from the Soundtrack Pro sample library, and then I split it into two parts. One part had the treble dropped, to accent the thud. The other part mixes in a ring modulator set at a fairly low frequency, which creates those mechanical "hoots" and a little bit of a noise pad. It keeps it from sounding too clean or rock n' roll.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 0 comments
Following up on my Trotskyist tendencies:
You might remember, if you play the occassional video game, when the genre started seriously moving toward 3D. Developers began to realize that it was a lot harder to pump out good-looking levels and gameplay in three dimensions, not in the least because better graphics carry with them higher expectations for realism and scale. As a consequence, a lot of games got shorter. Reviewers complained. I remember that Max Payne, a game with both photo-realistic aspirations and a genuinely witty storyline, often got marked down for its length--"criminally short" at ten hours long, said Gamespy. I'm sure non-gamers are a little bemused by that assessment.
Contrary to those critics, this was the best thing that ever happened to gaming.
Go back and play a game from, say, the NES or Super NES era. It's probably not as good as you remember. One reason is that there's a lot of make-work, basically chores that the game will make you go through. These chores contribute the majority of those mythical thirty-hour games we once played, back in the yesterdays of nostalgia. Players had to sit around and level up. They had to find different-colored keys. They had to solve puzzles by trial-and-error. A few exceptions aside, this was not a golden age. It was padding.
I believe, at some level, that video games can have an emotional and cultural meaning--they can be texts, the same way that movies and books can. A game can say something, can deliver a message, or can capture some kind of art. But it can't do that while it's wasting the player's time with a grind. This isn't an argument for cutscenes, or to say (as if I had any power anyway) that developers should stop including collection and leveling mechanics in their games. But we need to recognize that those mechanics are not value added, and that they are often an intrinsically worthless use of player time. Is it really worth struggling through those parts? Do you feel rewarded?
There are lots of boring, compulsive ways to spend time. Speaking solely for myself, I'd like to question whether a video game is my most productive option when it comes to doing my chores.
17:23 x Thomas x /gaming/perspective x link x 1 comment
Bass-n-drums rock specialists Clatter have dropped the price on their Blinded by Vision album now that they're back in the studio again. It's great stuff for $6. I'm going to keep annoying you until you buy it.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/artists/clatter x link x 0 comments
Resistance Is Character Forming
For those who have not had the pleasure of Iain M. Banks' fine Culture novels (what is wrong with you), one of my favorite bits is the ridiculous names that the AI-piloted ships give themselves. Wikipedia, as always a fine guide to geek culture if not for anything else, has a complete list sorted by novel. Some particularly good examples are the "Nuisance Value," the "Frank Exchange of Views," the "Stranger Here Myself," and the "Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality."
20:22 x Thomas x /fiction/brainjuice x link x 1 comment
Two of the Battlestar Galactica webisodes are up on scifi.com now. They're not badly done, but seem to suffer from the two-minute format. The long-format show crams a lot into forty minutes. Splitting it up so sharply might be making it hard to build the tension (some might say melodrama) that has been a trademark of the series.
From a futurist standpoint, the webisodes (a neologism I find less annoying than I thought I would) are a good mid-point between a typical Web non-presence and the in-depth obsessiveness of Lost's alternate reality games. Galactica has been good about rewarding fans online for a while, with the commentary podcasts and video blogs. Clearly it takes a lot of work to put these together, and I hope it pays off for them.
From a storyline standpoint, there seem to be a few callouts to civil war in Iraq coming up next season. Specifically, I'm thinking about the resistance infiltrating the Cylon police and hiding weapons caches behind religious icons. How much is coincidence and how much is intentional? That's never an easy answer with Galactica, which featured a torture scene with waterboarding in its first season. I'm looking forward to seeing if Ron Moore has anything to say about it on his blog.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/television/galactica x link x 0 comments
Although it seems to be working well in my recording tests, I'm not really convinced that a laptop-based solution is going to be appropriate for playing live. For one thing, I think the laptop gives the wrong impression--that I'm triggering samples, or that it's setting up my loops for me. With stompboxes and their relatively crude interface of footswitches and knobs, the theatricality of the live performance is preserved, which was a large part of the motivation for my pretentious solo project in the first place. Besides: dork with the laptop.
In any case, I'm surprised that there seem to be very few devoted audio notebook builders, other than Rain Recording's LiveBook or NUSYSTEMS in the UK. Alienware also makes a desktop chip-based "pro audio" laptop, but I'm guessing that's a bit hotter and high-power-consumption than I would want to work around. Beyond that, you're left with the usual suspects: MacBook, Lenovo Thinkpad, Sony Vaio, or other general-purpose machines.
I've been trying to think about what I would want in a live-rig laptop. I feel like there are two basic priorities: latency and durability. Screen size isn't critical for my needs, battery life would be nice (although clean power is more important), and the keyboard obviously wouldn't see much use. A huge factor for latency would be the interface--and here's where I think it's interesting that laptop audio hasn't really advanced past the Soundblaster days. Video output has become increasingly sophisticated, with upgradeable 3D cards and different ports, but it would take a miracle to find a laptop that could handle high-Z inputs (which are compatible with the load resistance of guitar pickups). Still, that's what USB interfaces are for, even if they add bulk and complexity.
I'm sure that if you have roadies and money for backups, it's worth taking a laptop into a rock situation. But I've never played that kind of crowd--I've played coffeeshops and seedy college bars. I worry about pulling it off the stand by the instrument cable, or some drunk spilling a drink all over it (the Lenovo's Thinkpad keyboard actually incorporates drains for liquid, which might help). Especially for non-DJ musicians, where audience members sometimes wander onstage and mess with the instrumentation, there are a lot of unpredictable factors to consider. No, I think I'm better off with dedicated pedals for live work. I'm tempted to reconsider when I have some money sitting around--but until someone offers an integrated pro-level audio interface in a durable shell (to make the whole package as simple as my stompboxes), the cash is better spent on analog hardware or a new bass.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
This Axon demo recorded for BassPlayer.tv is incredibly cool: it's a realtime pitch-to-MIDI converter that handles chords. Plus it can apparently detect where on the guitar you're playing, right or left hand, and change patches accordingly. So the top half of the fretboard can be a different instrument from the bottom, and each pickup can be a different instrument. Towards the end, the demo presenter plays a complete MIDI jazz trio with drums, bass, and Fender Rhodes organ, all triggered from what looks like a PRS guitar. They say it'll work almost as well on a bass as on a guitar.
Of course, it also runs $1,200, and it still requires installing a special hex pickup that listens to each string individually. It costs a lot to live this free, Wayne.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
MySpace is Terrible: Shameless Commerce Edition
The news that MySpace will begin allowing bands to sell their .mp3s has gotten people talking. I have a few concerns, though. One is that we should watch very carefully for the license conditions--before a few artists forced them to reconsider, the site's terms and conditions granted them extensive royalty-free rights to any songs posted there. Also, let's face it: MySpace is a mess. It's the programming equivalent of a Ford Pinto, likely to explode at even the slightest provocation. Right now that's just inconvenient, since all you're facing is the technical error message. With e-commerce and customers' credit card numbers involved, it'd be nice if the whole system felt like you could kick it without losing a foot.
This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group.
I was always rooting for CD Baby, personally. I've got a bias towards lossless formats.
But just as MySpace is stylistically the Web from a decade back, it's become the resurgence of all those old fears as well. Pedophiles, hacked bank accounts, spammers, and now scammers. I got a message from the Emerganza Festival today. They're a long-standing battle-of-the-bands style promoter, but of course it's a $70 entry fee and you have to sell your own tickets. In return, you get to play at venues like the 9:30 Club and the Velvet Lounge in DC. Not to be too blunt about it, but that's not like being told that the Nissan Pavilion will open its doors to you. I have friends who are playing at both of those venues now. They got there by playing at other clubs and being really dedicated, not by paying a promoter. Never pay to play, kids. If you're any good, you won't have to.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/business/distribution x link x 0 comments
Launch Vipers--I mean, Arwings
Maybe I'm the only person who does this, but sometimes if I'm watching a movie or a TV show it puts me in the mood to play a game. Watching a dumb action flick might make me want to play something where I can shoot something. And then I'm usually frustrated, because what I want to do right at that moment and what the game will let me do are very different. Or the storyline is too intrusive. It starts to take a lot of effort to map my imagination onto some pre-packaged entertainment--not surprising, because I'm not "supposed" to be using my imagination. Maybe I'm just not playing the right games.
All of which is a long way of saying that Star Fox: Command isn't a perfect game, but the defend-your-mothership-by-directing-outnumbered-fighters mechanic will be nice to have around when Galactica resumes in October.
10:40 x Thomas x /gaming/software/star_fox x link x 1 comment
Ouch:
And then, for the next year or so, I did. But practice hones one's talent.
00:00 x Thomas x /fiction/writing/quote x link x 0 comments
I contributed two sections of Northern Virginia Magazine's "The Future Is Bright" article. My profiles of Debbie Goforth and Jessica Ray are on pages 88 and 91, respectively. Probably not worth a six-walk block in the rain to pick it up if you don't need the clippings for your files (i.e. me). As far as I can figure, NoVA did pay me for the drunk driving article, but has yet to run it.
Also, the Animal-Crossing-Meets-Marx got a mention in USA Today's Tech_Space blog. She writes: "... Animal Crossing, about which I've heard so much and about which Mile Zero posted so entertainingly last week." Entertaining? I thought I was just trying to fill the remaining 294 megs on my server!
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/articles x link x 0 comments
