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.
Designing Learning Interventions that Last
Now that they're finally done, I've added one of the Learning Week podcasts to the audio section of my portfolio. It features Andrew Law, Head of BBC Worldwide Interactive Learning, and he talks about the impact of different formats and accessible media production on educational programs.
Although I'm not adding them to the portfolio, anyone who's interested in e-learning might also want to listen to the podcasts of David Kolb and Lorin Anderson. Kolb is one of the earliest proponents for experiential learning, and talks about its history and interaction with learning styles. Although he's arguably more important than Law, he required a lot more editing (sometimes more than 50 cuts per minute) to make his speech fully fluent. He still sounds a little odd sometimes, and I didn't want that to be a portfolio piece. Anderson was one of the academics who worked on an elaborate revision of Bloom's taxonomy in 2001. He discusses how the learning taxonomy is used for education, and also how to evaluate learning programs using these tools. It's slightly more obscure than Law's interview, but still interesting given the current emphasis on testing in education.
13:41 x Thomas x /bank/experience/personal x link x 0 comments
Two days ago Ars Technica noted a new published report on why FireWire is doomed. And all I can say is, good riddance.
Look, I know the technical arguments. I know that FireWire uses less CPU time because it enables direct memory access. I know that it has faster sustained throughput than USB2, and that it carries more power to its devices. I know that it allows smarter daisy-chaining, since each connection can negotiate its own bandwidth needs and transfer details. Thanks to this fascinating page, I know that FireWire has a better connector design (at least in its original 6-pin plug) than USB does.
I know all of this, and I don't care. FireWire is an unholy pain.
If you hotplug a Firewire device, it can destroy either the computer or the device ("rendered permanently inoperable" is a nice turn of phrase). FireWire's power requirements are high enough that most laptops (even those that include the full-sized 6-pin port) will not provide bus-power while running on batteries, or even at all, requiring users to carry an extra power brick for each device. FireWire devices here at work sometimes conflict with each other--one editing rig in our studios will only recognize the second external hard drive if we first unplug the DV-CAM deck. Firewire is prohibitively expensive, in part because Steve Jobs got greedy about licensing fees. The cards that aren't expensive tend to be flaky when used for pro applications. The FW800 and FW400 standards use completely different connectors, meaning that we have to buy adapters and new cables to use them. And while the USB connector is not a great design, both its host and device sides are still better designed than the flimsy and shallow 4-pin FireWire plug (the little one that most PC laptops accept).
I suspect that it may survive in the audio and video markets for a while--it's still the best way that I know of to get media in and out of a computer without using PCI cards. I'm stuck with it for a while. But I can't wait for someone to come up with a better solution.
Fun fact from Wikipedia: The standard FireWire connector is based on the Gameboy Multilink cable, since it had proven reliable, solid, easy to use, and childproof.
16:44 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 1 comment
We need a better word for "meme." It's not a good word, apologies to Dawkins. When read, it looks like "me, me," which may be appropriate but isn't flattering. When spoken aloud, it sounds like half a word (since it's based on the Greek mimeme, I guess it is).
Besides, the blog version of a "meme" is not really a contagious idea. It's a chain letter that's had the most irritating parts (the superstitious promise of good luck coupled with a veiled threat of catastrophe) removed, replacing those with the digital equivalent of a rapport-building exercise. That's not a meme, it's a well-meaning pyramid scam. Maybe we could call it a 411-9? (Yeah, if we wanted to restrict its audience to obscure wordplay.)
On the other hand, it's kind of clumsy to say "Lance just hit me with a well-meaning pyramid scam:"
Do I even know eight people who will do something like this? Eight people online, who are both willing to do it and know I'm alive? Let's find out. Here's a tag for Wheat, Brinstar, Josh, Athenae (that's a long shot), Corvus (and/or Rachel), Dan, Orac, and Deacon.
14:53 x Thomas x /random/personal/memes x link x 1 comment
In 1996, IBM begins researching the personal area network:
Instead we got Bluetooth, transmitted over boring ol' radio waves. It's too bad IBM's research didn't get more traction. There's something appropriate to the idea that the earpiece-wearing Blackberry addicts on the Metro might have to coordinate all that gear by running low-powered electric shocks through their bloodstream.
08:49 x Thomas x /random/tech/wireless x link x 0 comments
I have 26 days of leave accumulated over my soon-to-end two-year extended term at the Bank. 26 days--that's just slightly more than five work-weeks. And when I transition to a temporary short-term contract next week, the Bank will buy that leave back. Thoughts:
14:38 x Thomas x /bank/experience/hr x link x 1 comment
The next couple of days are all about the WBI Learning Week event--and more specifically, for my part, they're all about the expert interview podcasts. I wrote this theme on Friday for the podcasts, and then spent about an hour over the weekend beefing it up and remixing it. The defining feature is a three-octave arpeggio of a chord that I can't entirely place (I think it's a C major with a flatted 7th, the components are C, E, G, and Bb). I also hooked a drum map into the arpeggiator, latched the whole bunch, and then split the keyboard so that I could play the string accompaniment on the rest of the keys. It was a surprisingly effective way to put together a tune, and something I would have probably never done on my little two-octave keyboard.
Frankly, I'm writing more music nowadays on synth at work than I am on bass at home, and I still feel like my theory knowledge could be stronger (see limited chord knowledge above). So I have decided that I need to relearn how to play keys, and I might as well brush up on my reading while I'm at it. One of the video editors has a Yamaha DX27 that he brought in and abandoned, and I may see if he'll let me borrow it until I can save my pennies for a synth of my own. Next stop, Ben Folds transcription book.
In case you are wondering (you probably aren't), the arpeggios, string pad, high-hat, and kick in the theme are the X-Pand! synth--in fact, they're all on the same track, thanks to that split keboard trick and X-Pand's multi-voice patches. The indian flute, tamborine, cabasa, and choir are all Sampletank SE. I have to work around the bargain-basement palette of these two plugins most of the time--for example, I wanted the swells at the end of each phrase to be muted trumpets, but neither synth does them well, so instead they're a combination of choir and cello section. I imagine it would be interesting next year if my successor starts looking at soft synths come purchasing time, but it wasn't a priority this time around.
17:13 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 1 comment
There aren't a lot of what I consider pretty buildings in DC, outside of the Mall where the monuments and the Capitol building sit. But this building, the Thurgood Marshall Judiciary Building next to Union Station, struck me two nights ago. I don't know if this picture captures the full effect, but I love the trees inside.
10:32 x Thomas x /dc/photos x link x 1 comment
With the end of the fiscal year comes the end of our purchasing cycle at the World Bank. The downside of introducing audio production into the Multimedia Center's service lineup is that I'm on my way out just as we start getting more serious equipment. For example, you can see in this picture that we've splurged on audio baffling for all the walls of our recording booth. It's pretty acoustically dead in there now, with the exception of a noisy music stand and the glass window into the control room (I'm still trying to figure out what we could do about that glass). Obviously, we also got a new keyboard (just in time to write a few jingles), and you can see one of our Marantz portable audio recorders on the desk in front of the keyboard. Those things are great: they record from XLR, line in, or internal mikes to a compact flash card in either WAV or MP3. Then I can mount it via USB and drag the files right into my DAW. I've been handing them to our studio engineers for recording interviews, and the plan is to go entirely tapeless for that kind of thing, which would save us a tremendous amount of time (previously, they'd record to DV-CAM tapes, and then I'd have to dub that into Pro Tools).
The Bank runs a standard computer administration system called Enterprise Desktop 4. I can't find a reference to it anywhere in Google, so I'm guessing our IT department put it together themselves. It makes sense to have that in an office environment, so they can push updates and new software out to machines from a central location. But on my production machine, it was a disaster. Not only did it require a bunch of extra processes running in the background, but Pro Tools didn't seem to like the environment very much. So for two days, I worked using our Macbook while the main Pro Tools rig was stripped down to a bare-bones XP installation.
The difference is amazing. Everything's snappier, it's more reliable, and the whole desktop is much cleaner for my coworkers. And while I am not a huge fan of dongle-based copy-protection, I have to say that the iLok key made things a lot easier when reinstalling my software and plugins. I just made a copy of the folders onto my 1394 drive, and then copied it back after reinstalling Pro Tools 7.3. Almost everything worked without a hitch (my samplers still needed to be reloaded). There's a lot to be said for that.
At home, I keep a flash drive handy with copies of everything I use for production--Cubase, Phrazor, plugins, MIDI-OX scripts, and whatever drivers I need. That way, if anything goes wrong, I can wipe the entire machine, reinstall, and be running again in about an hour. I don't have time to troubleshoot on a production computer, and I'm guessing a lot of media production professionals feel the same way. So I'm hoping to do the same thing at work, maybe with a disk image. When I go, it would be nice to have someone around who understands the whole system and can fix it from inside. But if they don't have that, it shouldn't stop them from being able to recover from a bad driver or a trashed hard drive.
10:25 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 0 comments
I had to stop reading Boing Boing at some point. The air of wide-eyed technofetishism just got to be too much for me--one more adoring post about some hipster-kitsch art piece or ridiculous Web 7.0 application, and I might have been forced to hunt the whole bunch of them down with a meticulously-crafted clockpunk chainsaw somebody made at Burning Man.
That said, sometimes I still peek in, because if you can sort out the nonsense they do tend to be a clearing house for a certain kind of web zeitgeist, and a couple of days ago I followed a link to Good Copy, Bad Copy, a Danish documentary about copyright--particularly as it applies to music. You could be forgiven for thinking that not much new could be said on the topic, because most of the dialog about copyright and music in this country centers around the music industry's complaints of lost revenue, copyleftists scorning the industry's antiquated business model, and everyone else trying not to get caught. Good Copy does spend a slight (and tedious) segment on this, including everyone's favorite ex-IP lawyer, Lawrence Lessig. But the intriguing part of the movie, and the thread to which it devotes most of its narrative, is following the path of a piece of music around the world as it is digitally reinterpreted by a series of artists.
It starts with Danger Mouse, who created the "Grey Album" out of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. That was an Internet hit, and then it was basically cease-and-desisted out of existence by the labels, but Danger Mouse goes on to form half of Gnarls Barkley, and release a hit single named "Crazy." Halfway around the world, that song is then sampled and remixed by a Brazilian producer into a genre called techno brega, which is basically "cheesy techno" based on '80s electronica. The producer gives the new .mp3 to a pirate vendor for free, instead making money when the music attracts dancers to their gigs. Finally, the Brazilian version of "Crazy" finds its way (in a scene that may have been prearranged, but is no less clever for it) to Girl Talk, a.k.a. Greg Gillis, a goofy-looking Philadelphian known for producing illegally sample-dense remixes. So that's three or four layers of continuity taking place, and it's fascinating to watch.
Having read Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music lately, I was struck by not just the chain of events, but also what it said about the musical climate. Faking It (which I highly recommend) spends some time talking about the "authentic" music of Leadbelly and other primitive blues musicians, while noting that those musicians were actually carefully selected by White record companies as a way to present the most primitive, savage portrait of Black music possible. Fast-forward to only a few years ago, of course, and we find Kurt Cobain playing Leadbelly songs live to tap into that same mood. Yet many of those early recordings were of folk songs or traditional songs--stuff like "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," for example, or "Stagger Lee." No-one knows the exact provenance of those pieces. Hundreds of different versions were recorded, by artists both White and Black, in the genres that we now would consider blues, jazz, country, and rock. They have no copyrights. I find that fascinating.
As a rock musician, I don't normally sympathize with the copyright-fighting proponents of sampling. I'm not vehemently against them, understand, but I don't have a deep appreciation for the traditions of hip-hop, so I prefer to make my own noises most of the time. My common ground is the realization that there is no rock "Stagger Lee." If someone had written it now, that song would be owned by a major label and no-one else could have played it. We have no music that is community property, that anyone can reinterpret and claim as part of their personal culture. I think that's unfortunate. It would be an interesting project to hunt down those songs, reinterpret them, and reintroduce them into the musical community, to see if they could act as raw material again. And I would hope, with the spread of Creative Commons and other licenses, that we might be more likely to see music isolated from its creators, twisted, and changed along an almost oral tradition. That way, music becomes something people do, and not something that they own. It stops being a noun, a piece of property, and becomes a verb, which is all the more thrilling in its transitory action.
13:48 x Thomas x /music/business x link x 1 comment
[WBI Manager] (2:00 PM) Thomas - i have three new versions of the Aristotle quote. Are you ready for them? You pick the best [WBI Manager] (2:00 PM) 1. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. Thomas Wilburn (2:01 PM) NO. [WBI Manager] (2:01 PM) 2. That which we must learn to do, we learn by doing. Thomas Wilburn (2:01 PM) Maybe. [WBI Manager] (2:01 PM) 3. One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try. Thomas Wilburn (2:01 PM) I think that's someone else. Yoda, maybe.
14:09 x Thomas x /bank/experience/personal x link x 1 comment
Although he is a ridiculous figure, there is something about Uwe Boll's movies that's a cut above the average B-movie. I think it's the star power, actually. He's not much of a director for the A-list actors that his tax loophole payoff attracts, but even on a bad day many of his leads outshine the typical horror-movie fodder. It's especially apparent when his movies show up on Sci Fi, where a big pitch is apparently professional sibling Stephen Baldwin in "Stan Lee's Harpies."
Speaking of which, I wonder how that goes over in the evangelical community after Baldwin's much-publicized conversion. I know he's supposed to be the cool face of Christianity for the home-schooled crowd, but I have a hard time imagining that Army of Darkness ripoffs are really what they consider "godly" entertainment. Then again, I enjoyed Bubba Ho-Tep, so I'm really in no condition to judge anyone.
So today's Tivo'd diversion is Boll's Alone in the Dark, which corrals Tara Reid and Christian Slater together for an on-set disaster nearly as horrifying as the idea of Tara Reid and Christian Slater together off-set. The guide gives it 1 1/2 stars. I can hardly wait.
| 0:00 | Already, we're looking at a long chunk of on-screen text and narration, explaining something about a lost civilization and experiments that "merge man with creature." Sounds like a Mercer Mayer book gone horribly awry. A flashback establishes that the experiments were performed on orphans (except for one--I smell foreshadowing!) with the assistance of a weak-willed nun. Isn't that always the way? |
| 0:05 | Christian Slater wakes up from the flashback, unshaven and unkempt, on an airplane. Some kid tells him that there's nothing to be afraid of in the dark. Slater tells him that being afraid of the dark keeps most of us alive. I don't even know what that means. During a taxi montage, he voiceovers that he wasn't just scaring that kid for nothing, but that what you don't see can kill you. He's Edward Carnby: cliche hunter and child abuser. John Stossel in a trenchcoat. |
| 0:09 | The taxi montage leads directly to a car chase, the best moment of which is when Slater tells his cabbie to duck into a farmer's market and they immediately crash into a truck. The pursuing cabbie rams them, then gets out of the car and runs away--so he can jump down on Slater from a bridge. Why he needed the altitude is not entirely clear. The resulting fistfight ends in an ice factory, which I think exists only so that Boll can do a bullet time shot through a block of ice. There's also a lot of shoving going on, which is the mark of lazy action movie direction--if the bad guy shoves random people around to establish his evilness, he's clearing a pretty low bar. He could at least shoot an innocent bystander before Slater impales him on a convenient metal spike. |
| 0:12 | Tara Reid as a museum curator. I sense a great disturbance, as if thousands of casting directors cried out, and then were suddenly silenced. The last time I saw cheesecake this unaccountable was Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist for that James Bond movie. |
| 0:20 | On a boat, Reid's archaeologist boss has extracted some kind of evil basement refridgerator from the ocean. It's made of gold, which sets the boat's captain off in a capitalist lust. The archaeologist muses that nowadays "we don't even remember why gold is valuable in the first place." Perhaps to point out the stupidity of the statement, the captain slugs the archaeologist and cracks open the vault to get at the sweet, sweet precious metals inside. Sadly, the only thing in the case is an unseen evil force that slaughters the crew. Around the world, said force also activates some people that I guess are "man merged with creature." One of them shoves someone around on the way out of the house. Clearly, the height of malignancy. |
| 0:26 | Christian Slater has a flashback to establish that his orphanage was the center of these experiments, but he was somehow immune. After making some calls, he heads back to the orphanage, where he's greeted by the same nun. Long-lived, these sisters. Slater's driving an SUV in these sequences, by the way, so I guess being a crusty psychic detective pays pretty well. |
| 0:33 | As if to make sure that even the dimmest viewer gets the plot, Slater's contact at the paranormal Bureau 713 has a thirty second lunch with him, just long enough to establish that yes, all the disappearances are from his old orphanage. Alone in the Dark is actually filled, so far, with scenes that only last 30 seconds or so, just long enough to deliver their one line of exposition. Normally, I'd say that this kind of choppy, incoherent storytelling was the fault of the network's chopping it up to fit into two hours with commercials, but this is a Uwe Boll movie. Again, here's where he differs from most low-talent filmmakers, because most of them don't have the budget for so many location shots. It costs a lot to make a movie this badly. |
| 0:36 | Tara Reid and Christian Slater meet up at the museum. They hug, and then she punches him in the face. Score one for Tara Reid! Slater obtains forgiveness by handing over a paranormal artifact that he's been lugging around for the last 20 minutes. Jewelry makes things all better. Reid adds unintentional hilarity to her impression of a brilliant art expert by mispronouncing "Newfoundland" in her description of its history. |
| 0:38 | Remember that old horror movie where the creepy wooden tribal doll runs around a museum with a butcher knife? That's about ten times more disturbing than the giant bug that attacks the museum now. Especially when the SWAT team from Bureau 713 drops in, led by Stephen Dorff, and the bug just runs away. Another thirty-second conflict: done. This movie even makes The Relic's museum monster look terrifying. |
| 0:54 | Having returned from his disastrous boat trip, the archeologist injects himself with blood extracted from another giant bug, which he's keeping in the broom closet. Dude, there are easier ways to get high. Meanwhile, Slater's bureau friend explains that the monsters disrupt electricity (hence the darkness of the title and the flickering lights whenever they show up), but not flashlights, because "the shorter the path for the electricity, the less disruption." That's convenient, and also completely incoherent. He also passes on some bullets filled with light-producing resin, because they're allergic to sunlight. The producers of Underworld contemplate suing, but settle for watching Kate Beckinsdale in tight leather again. |
| 0:59 | Tara Reid shows up at Slater's loft apartment for no discernable reason, where he is passed out on a filthy mattress, and has sex with him, again for no discernable reason. I'm confused, and slightly unnerved. One or both of them should probably go get tested. |
| 1:05 | From sex directly to dubious archaeology--just like real life! The costume designers have obviously decided that putting little indie-girl glasses on Tara Reid will make her look smarter. Shockingly--and I say this as a guy who's totally got the hots for the indie glasses--it doesn't work at all. With thirty seconds elapsed from the last plot point, evil orphans and another bug now attack. The SWAT team drops in again. Why don't these guys ever use the door? Who's going to pay for all those windows? The resulting shootout resembles the first scene from Equilibrium, with lots of strobe-light gunflare in pitch darkness, although it goes on for about twice as long and includes a truly terrible nu-metal soundtrack. I have to admit, it does bear a strong resemblance to a video game. |
| 1:18 | Obligatory scene in which the characters prepare for the big finale, which looks like it will take place in a mine. While we wait for something interesting to happen, I'd like to say that I never actually played the Alone in the Dark games. I had a demo once, back in the late 80s, of the first one, but it only gave you one room, an attic, and had one monster, who burst in through the window a la a hellhound from Resident Evil. This movie seems to be based on the rebooted fourth game in the series, which ditched the offbeat adventure genre for forgettable survival horror. I think they would have been better off sticking to the setting from the earlier games, because monsters are almost always cooler in the 1930's. |
| 1:34 | Standing in a room wallpapered in human skulls, Christian Slater mutters, "I don't think we're supposed to be here." Subtle. Meanwhile, giant computer-animated bugs tear the marines outside the mine into little bits. For a movie that was previously edited like a tribute to ADD, Boll now finds the patience to linger for a long, long time on these shots. All the marines die. It's all very expensive and tasteless. Most of it is a ripoff of Aliens, except for the parts that are a ripoff of Starship Troopers. |
| 1:47 | Double cross! Triple cross! No-one cares! Tara Reid's boss reveals that he's one behind the experiments, and proceeds to open a door into a giant cave of darkness using the artifact from an hour and fifteen minutes ago. Now that it's assembled, it looks like a candleholder from Pier 1. Stephen Dorff tosses a knife into the archeologist's chest and then he stays to set off a bomb while the others run for the surface. I don't know why they're so desparate to get outside, since there's just a bunch of monsters and dead marines out there. |
| 1:54 | Wait, what? Slater and Reid climb out of the mine and end up just outside the orphanage which is in broad daylight. So I'm confused, because all of the previous scenes took place at midnight. Maybe they've been climbing for 12 hours. When they leave the orphanage, the city is evacuated according to the onscreen titles. Again, I'm not really sure when that happened. Slater voiceovers that the people have been wiped off the face of the earth, just like the ancient civilization. This word "evacuation," I do not think it means what you think it means. |
Final verdict: if we were ranking Uwe Boll movies, this is much better than House of the Dead. It's also better than Bloodrayne, but it only manages that by stealing virtually every moment from much better movies. Neither, of course, is anything to be proud of. There's also no real charisma on exhibit here, so you can't even feel sorry for its stars. The thing is, every month Sci Fi broadcasts monster of the week movies that are three times as good as this, with a fraction of the budget. If anyone should be profiting from illicit tax money, it's those guys. If that means supporting Stephen Baldwin's career, I think we should take that risk.
17:01 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/horror x link x 1 comment
These posts are summaries of the lessons I learned while studying public speaking on the GMU Forensics team. They have proven helpful to me, and I hope they'll be helpful for you, too.
14:43 x Thomas x /journalism/communication x link x 0 comments
Now we're getting picky.
Walking Points
There are three good reasons to physically move from one place to another during a speech. First, it shakes up the audience a little, gives them slightly different scenery to watch, and engages their twitch-motion reflex if you've lost their attention. Second, it establishes physical locations that act as a mnemonic for your points, and makes them easier to remember. Finally, it gives the speech a more dynamic presence, and gets you out from behind a podium.
For a three point speech, there's an acknowledged method in forensics for
walking the points, and since it works, I see no reason to change it.
Basically,
This isn't very hard. It takes a little bit of practice to remember to move at the relevant time in the speech, but it soon becomes second nature. The real trick is to make it seem natural--like you moved as a part of your expression, and not because someone told you to jerk into motion at that point in your speech. Practice is crucial, but so is technique. Here's one way to do it: as you finish one section and during the first sentence of the next, gesture toward the direction of your movement with the hand on the same side as that movement. Using that gesture to lead through, take your first step with the foot on the same side (i.e., when moving to the right, step with the right foot). If you step with the other foot, you'll have to cross yourself up from a standing position, which both looks awkward and closes your body to the audience. By using the leading gesture and the corresponding foot, you maintain an open posture to listeners. With practice, this becomes a smooth, casual motion, and stops looking premeditated, especially if you move while speaking instead of snapping into motion between sentences.
Memory
So with the exception of hiding behind the podium, there's not much that gets more in the way of speaking to an audience (as compared to at them) than reading from notes. Everything else in delivery--eye contact, walking, vocal rhythm--it's all shot if the speaker keeps looking down at a piece of paper, losing their place, or talking to the desk.
There are many ways to memorize, and I'm not going to claim that this will work for everyone. But when I had a speech written that had to be delivered at 9am the next day, here's how I went about committing it to memory.
Starting from the top, I read through the entire speech, one sentence at a time. I would make sure that I had that sentence correct, then move on to the next. At least several times, I would repeat not just the current sentence, but also the one before it. This builds a connection between the two--I might not be able to skip ahead three sentences, but I could automatically repeat what came next. At the end of each paragraph, I practiced going through the whole paragraph. At the end of each section, I tried to get through it in its entirety before moving on. The entire process is meant to connect the speech together in sequences of sentences.
It worked for me. Obviously, this process is much, much easier if you've written it yourself, because the words will come naturally to you.
Speaking in front of a camera
I don't have a ton of experience with this (if I remember correctly, commenter "thatfuzzybastard" is a film editor, who might have better advice), but I do know that speaking in front of a camera does change some aspects of the equation, and I've seen some of these issues come up while in the Multimedia Center studios. In my defense if I get something hideously wrong, I'm relying on Hausman, O'Donnell, and Benoit's Announcing: Broadcast Communicating Today, 4th Edition, which was published in 2000.
As far as clothing goes, don't wear red on camera. This may be out of date, especially as cameras have improved (and HD becomes more common), but I was always told that CCDs can react poorly to red, and it can make you look like a fire engine.
Also, try not to wear patterns. It will turn into a moire when the camera downsamples it, and it's distracting. This is less important at higher resolutions--but remember that not everyone shoots in HD, and nowadays not everyone produces for even standard definition. We had someone come in for a shoot wearing a patterned tie once for a web video. It moire'd in the original DV-CAM, and then the Real codec turned it into a fireworks display. Suddenly no-one had any idea what he was saying, because they were too hypnotized by the magical Time Tunnel on his chest.
You can ask the cameraperson or interviewer whether or not they want you to look at the camera. We usually ask people not to do so, and I end up sitting next to the camera to give them a point of reference. But wherever you're supposed to look, pick a spot and stick with it. If your eyes move around too much, or if they meet the camera sometimes and other times don't, you'll look shifty. And nobody likes that.
And from an editor's perspective, make it easy on them and you will probably be rewarded. Points that are made in a simple, direct--and above all, short--way are more likely to be picked as soundbites. It is a shame, in many ways, that soundbites have become so common. But having worked on a few projects here, we are almost always way long on time for our video productions, and have to cut back dramatically. The editors love people who can be trimmed without losing as much substance.
14:43 x Thomas x /journalism/communication x link x 1 comment
It's a little unfair for me to write a review of Guerilla Home Recording that pans its lack of digital awareness, without providing any information on the gaps I'd like it to fill. Here's a list of common problems that I've faced since I started learning about digital audio, and which I've rarely seen addressed in textbooks on production, either for pros or project studios.
In any case, eight inputs don't go very far for a full band, much less four (or less). Some people use that just for the drums. If you're smart and mix in the box with plugins, you can manage to record a power trio with seven inputs (two drum overheads, snare/hat, kick, guitar, vocals, and bass), but getting fancy, recording a live show, or adding more people is going to take more than most budget interfaces offer. Something will have to be mixed down, and that means making decisions that will play into the mix later. Guidance on how to do that is something that's sorely needed, far more than learning how to cope with a limited number of tracks (something I doubt many modern musicians seriously consider).
23:35 x Thomas x /music/recording x link x 1 comment
Book Review: Guerrilla Home Recording
There is a virtue to the subtitle of Karl Coryat's Guerrilla Home Recording, which claims to teach readers how to get great sound "no matter how weird or cheap your gear is." I heartily approve of this sentiment, but it's a wide field to cover, and invariably something's going to get left out. Unfortunately for Coryat, the gap here is basically all of digital audio, and that's kind of a big revolution to ignore, especially for a book published in 2005.
But first, let's establish what the book means by "guerrilla home recording." Basically, it means tossing aside a number of established pro-studio techniques, like never printing effects to tape, in favor of more pragmatic small-studio use. Coryat is a big fan of using sampled drums, for example, and he recommends close-miking everything instead of investing in expensive (and often ineffective) acoustic treatments. Above all, the book aims to convince readers that a perfectly adequate recording can be produced without $50,000 worth of studio gear. So far, so good. All of this is good advice, and something that non-pro musicians need to hear more often.
When it actually comes to recording the sound, Guerrilla Home Recording treats the process as a "black box" that's the same whether you're using analog or digital--and that's where the book falls flat on its face, because digital isn't just analog inside a computer. It's a radically different beast, and it means that a lot of Coryat's advice just doesn't apply any more. For example, he recommends owning a mixer and several stand-alone hardware effects units, including a compressor and a reverb. Now, a mixer's a handy thing, and I love buying new effects. But a digital project studio doesn't need any of that--it can all be done in software, for free, at a quality level that easily rivals budget-level hardware (in the case of the SIR convolution reverb plugin and a few others, it even rivals pro equipment). Likewise, it's a little silly to talk about "printing effects to tape" in this age of non-destructive effects. Sure, some musicians might use bounces and printing in something like Ableton Live Lite or Pro Tools LE when they run out of tracks, but those instances are both rare and easily reverted.
Whether or not the "professionals" have embraced it yet, digital is a true revolution for music recording, much the same way that it changed filmmaking and photography. Everything's faster and cheaper. The software's cheap and excellent (Reaper may still be a little ugly, but it's incredibly sharp for only $40) or even free and more than adequate (Krystal, bundled apps like Cubase LE and Live Lite, Garageband for Mac users), the plugins are free or cheaper than the hardware equivalent, and all of it will run easily on least year's computer (or last decade's). And tracking using these tools isn't like using analog, anymore than linear editing on film compares to Final Cut and Premiere in HD or using a darkroom compares to Photoshop.
Now, I understand that there are still holdouts on the old technology. I've played at session musician for people who are using standalone hard drive recorders or even cassette four-tracks. And I agree that a book on supporting "weird or cheap" gear should cover their use, to some extent. But Guerrilla Home Recording devotes a significant portion of its text to using older technologies for mixing, and even includes diagrams for mixing "out of the box" with a digital system. It's not that the information provided won't work with both analog and digital systems, but there's almost nothing provided on the only-digital side, and that's where the real guerrilla musicmaking is happening nowadays, in my opinion.
So if you've got any kind of computer-based studio setup, and once you eliminate the "here's a wave, here's what a compressor/reverb/distortion does" advice that every sound textbook offers, what you're left with is about half a (thin) book. That half is pretty good, sprinkled with tidbits of cool advice (using a drum machine to trigger a synth bassline is clever, for example), but it's not $25 good. There are big, thick sound guides out there for $25--and while they're not "guerrilla," they're up-to-date and cover conceptual frameworks that even free computer studios can use effectively.
13:44 x Thomas x /music/recording x link x 1 comment
Me Me Me: Interactive Entertainment and Narcissism
So there's the story behind an acclaimed niche game, taken from Mobygames:
Our hero must embark on a quest to slay 16 colossus, giant creatures that tower hundreds of feet above the Earth. Using his ancient sword and his horse Argo, he must travel across the immense landscape seeking the colossi to save his love. Taking the form of various animals and other bipedal creatures, these colossi are tough and fierce. Their skin is tougher than leather, and the armor they wear is literally rock. However, by using his ancient sword, the man can penetrate the weak spot on them and destroy the towering beings and free his love's soul.
And then there's the plot summary for an acclaimed niche movie, taken from IMDB:
No, that's not entirely fair--but I'm not trying to be fair. After all, I could nominate any number of movies to take the place of that latter description. They might not have the exact same theme as Junebug, but films with shaded or outright unlikeable characters, open storylines, and no clear sense of resolution are a dime a dozen. Whereas you'd be hard-pressed to find a game that doesn't put the player into the position of being a Hero in the classical sense, complete with journey and bold nemesis to be defeated. You almost certainly can't find an interactive narrative that centers around Southern family dynamics.
This isn't about the violence, per se. It's about the kinds of stories that these media can tell. See, I'm just not sure that you actually could make a game that doesn't put the player into the position of an active, heroic force. Interactivity grants agency, and agency for most people means trying to make "better" choices. Even assuming that someone could make an interactive version of Sherrybaby, for example, who'd want to play it? Would it honestly have the same impact?
The form of the medium shapes the stories that it can tell, and I wonder if we are reaching the limits of that for interactive entertainment. Maybe that's a good thing--that it is ultimately a hopeful medium. But it is also a narcissistic one. By necessity, it casts its audience as someone who can Make A Difference, and sets aside any of the smaller stories about people who can't. That might even encourage a false hope--we don't all grow up to be President, you know.
Netjak put up an editorial that scooped me on this a little, but I think they're ultimately addressing a more limited problem. Healey is asking for more than just "save the world" plots--I'm hoping for a plot that doesn't save anything at all. What do you think? Is this an inherent lack of depth in interactive entertainment? Is hopelessness part of the button-pressing palette?
Answers that we are better off without the angst in the first place will not be accepted. A little angst is good for you. It builds character.
* * *
Apparently this is now a Round Table post. Who knew?
15:06 x Thomas x /gaming/design/story x link x 1 comment
Musical Sketchpad, Session Eleven
Trouble, oh trouble set me free
It's been a while since I did any recording. And I've been meaning to do a new cover for a while, using more production instead of looping. So here's a punk cover of Cat Stevens' "Trouble," done just using the Variax and an assortment of Cubase plugins. I don't really have the voice for this kind of thing, but I like the rest, and I'm very proud with the drum programming.
23:17 x Thomas x /music/recording/sketchpad x link x 1 comment
I'm late to the Heroes party because I didn't particularly care for the first episode. Not that it was bad, it just didn't grab me. Because I wasn't hooked from the start, I didn't add it to our TiVo list. Because I didn't add it to our TiVo list, we got halfway through the season before everyone started talking about how great the show was. And because Heroes is serial television, Belle and I didn't want to jump in halfway, so we didn't watch it. We figured we'd just Netflix the DVDs or (as it turns out) record the episodes when SciFi ran a marathon.
I like the show. I think it's got weak points, mainly in the characterization and plotting--people do things sometimes just because if they didn't, there wouldn't be much of a story left over. I'm willing to put up with that because the cast is very good, the writing is often funny, and the overarching story is enjoyably sinister.
Some people have compared Heroes to Alan Moore's Watchmen in its plotline, even to the point of saying that the former "borrows" heavily from the latter. In both cases, a cabal/evil genius plots to unite the world in a utopia of fear by destroying New York City with a superhuman bomb/genetically-created monster. It's not implausible that the writers could have picked up the plotline from Moore's work, which is one of the most well-known works in the genre. Maybe they did. I haven't read any interviews, I don't know.
On the other hand, the big elephant in the room for Heroes is September 11, even though the event itself goes conspicuously absent. There's talk of terrorism in New York, but nobody discusses the obvious connection. And the Bush administration may not exist in Heroes, but there's something familiar about the plan to exploit an easily-prevented tragedy for goodwill, only to squander it by turning the country into a terrified fascist state (as the jumps to five years "in the future" demonstrate).
It's obvious that Tim Kring and the other writers tiptoed around the issue a bit. I almost get the feeling that they were unsure whether or not to take the comparison to a more obvious level, or if they're backing away from it. I doubt NBC would be terribly happy if they came outright to say that the show's about Bush's failed war on terror.
But here's the thing: it's almost painful--like, actually cringe-inducing--to watch the writers of Heroes contort and twist to try to avoid 9/11. They're not fooling anyone, except maybe the network, into thinking that this isn't political. The sad thing is that it would be a better show if it just came out and said what it wants to say. Or, even better, if they were really willing to use their fictional platform to explore the issue in a slightly different light.
Superheroes are a fine place to start looking at political issues. That's part of Watchmen's legacy--it was one of the first attempts to critically examine what those caped vigilantes really represent. A superhero isn't a cop, honestly. They're an army. They "fight crime." A policeman "keeps the peace." And there's a very serious difference there, not the least of which is the outlook: a superhero basically exists on the assumption that there are bad people out there that must be stopped, preferably with mind-bullets.
I don't think that Heroes really aspires to explore the issue, but it is worthy of more ambiguity than it credits to itself. It demonstrates sympathy toward some of its villains, and puts its protagonists in awkward situations. It plays with the idea that New York might actually be demolished by its most empathic and good-hearted character.
But the writers don't go quite far enough in either direction. They clearly want us to understand that using the bomb as motivation for the public will lead to disaster. We never believe that the Linderman conspiracy might actually work, or that the world might actually need it. The conspirators are monsters--well-meaning monsters, but still unambiguously so. Between that and the show's touchy relationship with real-life terrorism, it has to walk a middle ground: not playful enough with its premise to be really thought-provoking, but not bold enough with its plotlines to go for the gut. I guess that leaves it at about the lungs, a little conspicuously airy as the first season wraps up.
14:59 x Thomas x /movies/television/heroes x link x 1 comment
Won't lie, it was nice to have a week away. Almost considered not coming back. When work is busy (I've been putting together the second set of Africa Good Governance on the Radio Waves programs, and that's never a smooth project), I don't find myself with much time to think about extracurricular writing, and at home it's too tempting to just relax and do something less challenging. Belle and I watched the first season of Heroes this week, for example. Good show.
Still, I'm kind of compulsive about writing. It's habit-forming, and it's therapeutic. But writing on a blog is also a dialog, as I said. It's like talking to yourself, except other people can read it. I think that puts it one step above crazy street person in terms of psychological profile, just because of the literacy requirement, although I've met some pretty literate crazy street people.
Anyway, the point is that blogging is like talking to yourself, but not entirely. There's comments, for one thing. For another, it's not completely isolated. That bothers me a little, as I go through the archives. There are topics I write about here, and I wonder if they would really be so important to me if events hadn't wandered their way.
For example: I turned MileZero.org into a blog in late April 2005, a little over two years ago. In early June, barely a month later, I managed to get myself into an argument with the editor of a gaming print magazine, and got linked by a number of the blogs on the right side of the page there. It felt like a big deal, and there are a lot of game-related posts after that. I don't know if it's because I was really so interested, or if it was the rush of joining a new community.
That's happened several times. For a while, I wrote a lot more music posts, especially after I got linked for coding the Excel drum machine. Some of this is just my changing moods--I have my obsessions, but I don't really consider myself single issue. I think I'm lucky, actually. Although I've had a number of people comment here or link to my posts, Mile Zero has never been a strict gaming or music or politics or culture blog.
On the other hand, I'd be lying if I don't sometimes wonder how long I can go without writing about a topic, because I know that's what some people probably come to read. I know I've written posts sometimes when my heart wasn't in it, just because I thought people might be getting bored. I have a love-hate relationship with my readership statistics.
Like a couple of weeks back, when Lance Mannion wrote a post saying that he'd added me and a few other people to his blogroll. That's an honor, and I was really proud. But at the same time, I also started thinking: "great, now what in the world should I write to keep people like him around?"
I kid, of course. No-one will ever de-link me. I have blackmail material on all of them.
We're social animals. We all react to the opinions and statements of people around us. That doesn't change just because our peers are online, instead of being neighbors and coworkers. Some people are wired to respond to that more than others--I think most writers online fit that profile. It makes me a little nervous to know that about myself, but it's probably best that I channel it into some kind of productive path.
Because if the blog thing doesn't work out, I've got these sandwich boards in the closet, and a spot all picked out in front of the White House. I think it could be a hit.
21:22 x Thomas x /meta/why_or_why_not x link x 1 comment
One Perl script later, the archives have been partially sorted. I'll do the rest a bit at a time.
I don't actually care if the dates are absolutely correct, as long as everything's in some kind of order. A blog, as I see it, builds on earlier work in a kind of dialog with itself. When the order is lost, the big advantage of this format is lost.
Once it's ordered, I'll have to start looking into ways to either back up Blosxom accurately, or incorporate dates as metadata into the file somewhere, so this won't happen again.
Updates will resume on a regular basis once they get Pico reinstalled. I can't work with this Vi program.
23:10 x Thomas x /meta x link x 1 comment
The current word from my server operator is that they can't restore my filestamps at all, which means I'll have to do it manually. The Internet Archive only has my page history through April of last year, and I don't know how much I can remember of the rest. Not to mention that there are probably seven or eight hundred files that I'll need to touch individually now.
I am not happy about this at all. Frankly, I'm tempted just to trash the whole thing, although I will probably feel more optimistic in the morning.
11:30 x Thomas x /meta/blosxom x link x 1 comment
