Supplementary Material

Winner of the 2007 Focus Film Festival.

I did the camera. Thanks to my dad and younger bro, Skyler.

More verbose posts to come...

I'm in an internet commerical

www.keyprop.com/worryfreeliving

So, just before the winter break I had a free day during exam period. What's the best way to spend a free day? Why - participate in a commercial!

You notice me as the guy holding the tuba, sweating his ass off in the sweat red digs.

There are four episodes coming out in total. I think I have bit parts in all of them - click on the link above to see them.

Sometimes I wish I was Japanese

The Hole - video powered by Metacafe

Shat

I just realized - perhaps its just me - that the word "shat" is an acceptable term for the past tense of shit.

I'll have to use it in a paper to find out.

Go nested sentence structure!

Second Life is Open Source

Second Life is now open source. Now I'm not entirely sure to what breadth or depth this will mean to anyone that happens to read this, but WOW (not that other MMORPG, I'm exclaiming something).

To get the background on this, go here:
Second Life wikipedia Article

This is, I think, a very significant moment. I mean, I'm sure that the idea has been passed around Linden Lab, but I never myself thought that they would actually do it. Honestly, I figured it was a moment of self-preservation. There are many other competing virtual worlds out there, many with better options, but Second Life has always been the one with the best community. Actually, their community is terrific. I've been a "resident" (defined as one who has actually logged in to the 3D server) since 2003 or so, just a few months after it came out of Beta.

It looks like they have now made only the viewer open source. There was an on-going project of users to make their own viewer and I believe it has finished. So it looks like Linden Lab is taking things into their own hands, just like the Lindex incident of a few years ago.

I can't wait to see what happens next. I'm usually too occupied with RL (the abbreviation users use of "real life") to actually get involved seriously with this. For a while, I was trying to program some ALife stuff, but got frustrated with the LLScript or whatever they call the stuff they using for coding in-world.



If you're interested, go to the website:
www.secondlife.com
Its free to log in, and the open-access area of the world is at least 100 square kilometers. The company gets revenue from selling parcels of land in the world (some of which I owned for a while).

You can also browse the world without being connected, using Slurl, which works like google maps. If you have the SecondLife browser, clicking on the map "teleports" you to the physical place. Holy crap!

www.slurl.com

Moral Problems

How can incest be considered not cool, yet a threesome with twins is okay, and considered to be awesome?

Isn't stuff happening between twins, like, worse than incest?

It's these sort of problems that have plagued me for lack of better things to think about. That is, until second semester starts in two days.

I'm doing my usual strategy - register for a shitload of courses and drop them as I see fit. Except some of these courses I'm not officially "registered" in yet, since I don't "have" their prerequisites. If, after the first week, I "like" them, I will "talk" to the profs and hope they'll let me in.

Found on a Golden VideoTape

Part 1


Part 2

A picture a day for six years

The eyes of the man in this video are very sad. Why is that? Watch his hair mostly as it flails in a maelstrom about his monoexpression face. I get a sense that he is getting older, yet I feel that he isn't changing. I see him in a variety of environment, so his life seems interesting, but there seems to be a feeling of deep sadness.

Is it the inevitability of aging? I don't know. I feel this video affected me alot though. I'm going to go watch Robot Chicken instead.

The Interactive Universe

I just discovered the most amazing game - Samorost. The control of this game is such that you play a character (in the loose sense) navigating about a world in a puzzle-solving mode. But, the cool part of this game is that you get to make choices about your environment which should be beyond your control.



In typical puzzle games, the player would only be able to make choices that the player's character could make, physically.

For example
You walk into a casino. You are presented with a choice to play either the slots or craps. Whether you win or lose is based on your skill and luck (if you actually play the game-wthin-a-game) or is pre-determined by the designer.

In the new style of the game (I'm not sure if it has a name yet) you get to make the choice about the outcome, like if you lose or win big at the slots. This sounds a little ridiculous at first. Doesn't it ruin the point of the game, which is to test your skill?

No.

Not when the game is about storytelling, and when the goal of the game being played is to produce the most interesting story, or a particular story the designer had in mind.

In Samorost, you can control parts of your environment which are beyond the normal control of your character, for example:

A bird's flight.
When a fish bites on a rod.
Which branch a monkey swings on.

The gameplay element is still there, as there is a set of correct choices to advance the story, but the choices that can be made are not confined to what is physically possible from the embodiment of the character's point of view.

OR

I had said that in Samorost you are playing a character in "the loose sense". The irregularities I pointed out about the character being able to do things beyond their control do not matter if you treat the game player as a "god" of the universe, with his/her own agenda. Then, what I had called the player's characters before is now just a character in the broader universe. I don't think this is necessary though.

I see a parallel between choices in this game sense and choices that I make as an improviser. When I play a story-based improv game, I play a role, and if I'm playing improvisation properly, I make good choices that drive the story forward and make it interesting. This is done by feeding, endowing, offers etc.

For example

Someone passes me a (mimed) envelope. I say something like
"I see, its the inheritance from my grandmother."
Or
"Oh no! A death threat!"
Or
"Strange...just an address and a time."

All of which would advance the story. I wouldn't make a choice like:
"Its the utilities bill."
Or
"Another Christmas card from the Jefferson's."
Or
"Its the wrong address."

NOTE: The wrong choices here could potentially lead to stories, but they aren't as immediately interesting as the first three.

The choices that I as an improvisor should make are any that advance the story. Not a choice that my character made, but one that I as an improvisor made about the universe. So, I don't think its necessary to view the gameplayer as a "god" of this particular game, Samorost. It takes some emotional attachment away from the player's character, which I might add is really cute. The objectives of the character (stop an object from hitting his home in Samorost I, rescue his dog in Samorost II) are less personal if the gameplayer is treated as a god, and not an extension of the character. This lowers stakes (BAD IMPROV!)

Coming up, I'm trying to introduce these sort of choices in my choose your own adventure, "A night on the town". I'm writing it in flash now, and once the story structure is down I'm going to go through again and make the language prettier. Keep watching!

Why is the Pioneer Plaque so sexist?

My home page for the last while when Firefox starts has been the wikipedia start page. Just a few minutes ago, I was greeted with this:



This is the Pioneer Plaque, a gold-engraved image sent out on the spacecrafts Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. For those that didn't know, these were two spacecrafts that were launched in the mid-70s to take advantage of the gravitational slingshot effect of the solar system's planetary alignment in that decade. The Voyager spacecrafts were launched later for the same reason.

Presumably, some intelligent race of creatures will find this plaque and be able to decipher all sorts of things about the human race, including the location of Earth (oh no! cylons!) (Un)fortunately, it will take the age of the galaxy already at least for the spacecraft to get anywhere near a habitable solar system, so chances of the plaques actually being seen are slim.

ANYWAY

What I'm getting to is that the engraving is horribly sexist. The male stands strong, waving one hand at whoever gazes on the engraving, while the women slumps to one side, doing nothing other than being present, and not really even having a facial expression. Come on! This was the seventies!

PS. "AI for Game Developers" just came in the mail today. Oh man!